Yuanhang Yang, MSc, BMed, is a HealthPros fellow and PhD candidate at Aalborg University Hospital on ‘Quality of health care for vulnerable populations: Are we Closing Disparity Gaps?’. His PhD research is focusing on developing evaluation methods for monitoring changes over time of disparities in quality of health care for vulnerable populations and implementation in clinical practice.

Prior to joining in HealthPros, Yuanhang worked as Statistical Programmer at Pfizer’s Research & Development Center in Shanghai, China, supporting for clinical data analysis in various therapeutic areas. He obtained an MSc in Health Policy from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Bachelor of Medicine from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

Erica Barbazza, MSc, BHSc, is a HealthPros fellow and PhD candidate at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam on the transferability of actionable healthcare performance indicators. Her research aims to put focus on indicators for measurement of the capacity, performance and impact of primary health care.

Prior to joining HealthPros, Erica was a technical officer at the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care in Almaty, Kazakhstan where she worked on topics related to integrated health services delivery, quality of care and primary health care performance. She has also worked as a technical officer at the WHO European Regional Office for Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In these roles, Erica has provided international technical assistance in countries across central Asia and Europe including Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Georgia, Republic of Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine. Erica has contributed to a number of WHO publications including technical reports, policy briefs, book chapters, as well as peer-reviewed articles on health services delivery, health system governance and integrated health services.

Erica obtained an MSc in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and BHSc in Health Sciences from the University of Western Ontario.

After graduating with a B.Sc. degree in biomedical science, Claire started her career in the field of intellectual property. While interning at the European Patent Office, she became particularly interested in the implications that patent protection has on patient access to medicines and healthcare. This subsequently led her to work for the Medicines Patent Pool, a non-profit organisation that helps improve access to medicines for patients in developing countries. To further her education, Claire completed her M.Sc. degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. At the end of her master studies, she joined the Decision Science team at the French Institute for Health and Medical Science Research (INSERM), where she conducted cost-effectiveness analysis of providing innovative treatment to patients with HCV related cirrhosis. More recently, Claire worked as an analyst for the information company IHS Markit in the life sciences sector.       

Mekha Ann Mathew graduated with a Bachelor’s in Dental Surgery (BDS) in 2016, while also being a Rotaract member and helping in setting up free health camps in rural India.

After the successful completion of Internship, she took up master’s in Public Health in University College Cork, Ireland. Getting acquainted with quantitative analysis, SPSS, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, she chose “Oral health literacy amongst third level students in Cork” as the key area of focus for her master’s thesis. During the duration of the course, she took up an Internship with Cork Sports Partnership, and concentrated on Health Promotion.

Subsequently, she began working on a HRB funded project with Hospital In-Patient (HIPE) data, regarding Activity based funding (ABF) amongst the hospitals groups of Ireland in 2018 and contributed significantly to setting up of the conference “Social Determinants of Health 2020” as a medium of dissemination for the key findings. The scope of the project expanded to include area level deprivation in relation to small areas and Pobal HP index and length of stay and diagnosis related categories. The results will be further distributed as a report for policy changes with the stakeholders, Health Services Executive (HSE), Health Pricing Office (HPO), Healthy Ireland, Hospital Groups Ireland and University of Limerick.

Currently, she is working as a HealthPros fellow, Early Stage Researcher, based in Nuffield department of health, University of Oxford, analysing the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research and Surveillance Centre’s (RSC) data with R. Through her work, she intends to halt the “book to shelf” phenomenon common in academics and make relevant real-life changes with the right interventions in policy and practise.