Dr. Sarah Pallas leads the Economics Unit of CDC’s Global Immunization Division, which conducts economic evaluations of immunization interventions and provides technical assistance on economics and financing for global immunization programs. She has served as a member of the WHO SAGE Working Group on COVID-19 Vaccines, co-chairing its Impact Modelling subgroup. She completed her Prevention Effectiveness Fellowship in CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS, serving as the PEPFAR Expenditure Analysis Advisor for Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Previously, Dr. Pallas worked for Development Finance International, Inc., and with Population Services International. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco and Togo.
xgx4@cdc.gov
Roopa Darwar works for the Economics Unit, Global Immunization Division, Global Health Center, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct economic evaluations of immunization systems and interventions in low- and middle-income countries. Her research interests include vaccine-preventable disease surveillance, supplementary immunization activities/campaigns, vaccine introductions, rapid diagnostic tests, and school immunization screenings. Previously, with the Africa Team of the Polio Eradication Branch in the CDC Global Immunization Division, she assessed outbreak responses to circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses in the context of the global switch from trivalent to bivalent oral poliovirus vaccine.
Sachiko (Sachi) Ozawa, PhD, MHS, is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Eshelman School of Pharmacy and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Maternal and Child Health at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in the United States. She is a health economist whose work focuses on generating evidence to improve access to vaccines and quality-assured medicines, working at the interface between pharmacy and public health. She has published over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals conducting research on the value of vaccines, the economic impact of substandard and falsified medicines, and the threat of illegitimate online pharmacies. Her work has been presented at the National Press Club, became Health Affairs’ top 10 most read articles in 2016, cited by the Prime Minister of Canada, and was tweeted by Bill Gates. Her work has been reported by the Washington Post, Forbes, CNN Business, Reuters, National Public Radio (NPR), and other news media.
ozawa@email.unc.edu
Rachel Hounsell is a health economist and mathematical modeller with an interest in applied research to support policy-making. She holds a Master’s in Development Finance from UCT’s Graduate School of Business and an MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine from the University of Oxford. Rachel is currently a PhD candidate at Oxford and a research fellow at the Modelling and Simulation Hub, Africa (MASHA) at UCT. Before joining MASHA, Rachel worked as a technical advisor for the WHO, as an economic consultant for SADC, in project management and research at LSHTM, and co-founded an international initiative in social innovation for health in partnership with WHO.
rachel.hounsell@gtc.ox.ac.uk