Interview: Setting up NICE International

Kalipso Chalkidou is the founding director of the NICE's international program helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for using evidence to inform health policy. She is interested in how comparative effectiveness evidence, combined with local expertise and local institutions, can drive scientific and legitimate healthcare resource allocation decisions. She has been involved in the Chinese rural health reform and also in national health reform projects in Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Department For International Development (DFID) and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as national governments. She holds a doctorate on the molecular biology of prostate cancer from the University of Newcastle (UK), an MD with Honors from the University of Athens (Greece) and is an honorary senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), a senior advisor on international policy at the Center for Medical Technology Policy (MD, USA) and a visiting faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute for Bioethics (MD, USA). Between 2007 and 2008, she spent a year at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy and Practice, studying how comparative effectiveness research can inform policy and US government drug pricing policies.