Measures for Improved Availability of medicines and vaccines (MIA)

Jahre has been working with disaster relief logistics research and teaching since 2007, heading projects and supervising students undertaken in cooperation with IFRC, UNHCR, UNFPA, UNICEF, Norwegian Red Cross, and the Norwegian Refugee Council. She is an international delegate to the Norwegian Red Cross, and undertook projects on health supply chains in Uganda for UNICEF. She now heads a mobility project in cooperation with Jimma University in Ethiopia, a research project on drug shortage in cooperation with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI) and 3 other universities, and a research project on Covid-19 response together with FHI and two health research institutes in Ethiopia

His research interests are primarily in logistics and transportation systems, equity considerations in allocation problems, and strategic trade-offs. His current projects focus mainly on humanitarian logistics and access to health/medicine.

Dalen has worked extensively with projects on pharmaceutical markets, including studies of biopharma in European hospitals, generic substitution, and the effect of funding schemes on prescription choices. He is currently participating in a research project on drug shortage, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

In addition to academic research, Dalen has extensive experience from policy analysis and consulting for ministries and private companies. He is currently the academic lead of a larger review of pharmaceutical spending and policies in Norway, a joint project with Vista Analyse and Ernst & Young for the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Health and Care Services.

Dalen is serving on the Board of Nye Veier AS, a state-company owned by the Ministry of Transportation and Communication. Nye Veier is responsible of planning, building and maintaining major road infrastructure in Norway.

In close cooperation with relevant stakeholders, Harwin analyzes how such supply chains impact patients and how they could be improved. Harwin won several prizes with his research, including the INFORMS Healthcare Best Student Paper Award 2015, and published several academic papers in scientific journals, including Production and Operations Management, Omega, PLoS Computational Biology, and European Journal of Operational Research. Before joining RSM, Harwin worked at INSEAD (France) as postdoctoral researcher and manager of the INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group. Harwin holds a PhD degree in Operations Research from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

She has also been part of an assessment on the implementation of a data quality improvement plan for vaccines in Afghanistan. Nonhlanhla’s research interest is in humanitarian operations and supply chain management where she primarily explores issues in complex emergencies and overlapping disaster situations. Her first academic publication is in the Journal of Operations Management.

He relies on queueing networks, mixed integer programming and dynamic programming to analyze and improve their performance. His work is practice-based and in collaboration with companies in the consumer electronics and biopharmaceutical industry. He published several academic papers in scientific journals, including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, and Chemical Engineering Research and Design. Before joining RSM, Stef obtained his PhD in Applied Economics at KU Leuven (Belgium) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at INSEAD’s Technology and Operations Management (France).

Kostas is also interested in how government procurement and contracting can be used strategically to pursue public policy goals, notably promoting healthcare innovation and improving availability of medicines and vaccines. Kostas’ research has attracted external funding from multiple sources including the British Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Swedish Defence Research Agency.

His work has appeared in international peer-reviewed outlets such as the International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Supply Chain Management: An International Journal. Kostas serves as an Associate Editor in the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management. He has held visiting positions at numerous institutions internationally, such as the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University, Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, and Stockholm School of Economics.

Her research projects are aimed at discovering so-called ‘decision traps': decisions that seem to be good on the short term, but have counterproductive effects on the long term. For this purpose, she develops system dynamics models based on actual project data. She also teaches project management and system dynamics to executive, master, and bachelor students. She has published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Project Management Journal, Journal of the Operational Research Society, and International Journal of Operations and Production Management.

In 2006, he received EURO’s Gold Medal. He is Distinguished Fellow of the Manufacturing and Services Operations Management Society (MSOM 2009), and Honorary Fellow of the European Operations Management Association (EUROMA 2013). In 2018 he was elected Fellow of INFORMS and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Thessaloniki.

At INSEAD Emeritus Professor Van Wassenhove holds the Henry Ford Chair in Manufacturing, as emeritus. He created the INSEAD Social Innovation Center and acted as academic director until 2010. He currently leads INSEAD’s Humanitarian Research Group and its Sustainable Operations Initiative.

Professor Van Wassenhove currently focuses on aligning business models and new technologies with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, e.g. closed-loop supply chains, circular economy, and disaster and health logistics.

He applies operational research and other analytical methods to improve the understanding and operation of systems ranging from disease progression in individuals through transmission of infections within population, to the operational, tactical and strategic planning of hospitals and departments within hospitals, in several countries.

He is particularly interested in the application of discrete-event simulation, agent-based simulation, system dynamics simulation and the combination of simulation methods together and with other methods, to identify system wide improvements and unintended consequences. He has published papers in the European Journal of Operational Research, BMC Health Services Research, Journal of Neurology, Health & Social Care in the Community, and the proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference and contributed to a chapter in the edited book Discrete‐Event Simulation and System Dynamics for Management Decision Making.

He has published in a wide range of national and international journals. He is currently on the board of the Society for Medical Decision Making as the first from a Scandinavian country.

She was a member of the World Health Organization expert review panel for the overall programme review of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property. She led the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation’s (Norad) efforts within the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children. She was also a member of the Secretariat for WHO’s Consultative Expert Working Group on R&D: Financing and Coordination. She currently works for the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) with a focus on the policy aspects of antimicrobial resistance.

Årdal was a co-lead for the DRIVE-AB research project which aimed to transform the way policymakers stimulate innovation, the sustainable use, and the equitable availability of novel antibiotics to meet unmet public health needs. She is currently the co-lead of the research and innovation work package for the European Union’s Joint Action on Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare-Associated Infections (EU-JAMRAI). She received a master of business administration from the Rotterdam School of Management and her PhD (alternative business models for discovering and developing new medicines for “neglected” diseases, particularly open source drug discovery) from the University of Oslo.

Emily is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Humanitarian Response Lab, where her thesis work centered on personal protective equipment supply chains during the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak. Emily has continued in the study and practice of health and humanitarian supply chain. She completed a Fulbright research project on Nigeria’s vaccine supply chains and subsequently served as a Supply Chain Officer with the World Food Programme for several years, where she supported humanitarian responses including the 2019 Ebola outbreak in northeastern DRC. Emily currently works with a logistics start-up based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ahlqvist wrote her master thesis on construction logistics and has previously works as a health and security manager and production engineer at a large construction company. Her current research interests are in supply chain risk management and governance as well as emergency supply chains and critical infrastructure flows.

He is the author of many peer reviewed scientific publications and his work has been featured in prominent print and broadcast media including The Economist, The Financial Times, Nature, and BBC. Yadav’s research has received best paper awards from the Production and Operations Management Society, INFORMS, and other scientific bodies. In addition to this role at INSEAD, Prashant is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development and a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Before coming to INSEAD Prashant was Strategy Leader-Supply Chain at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He serves on the boards of many global organizations and social enterprises. He has been invited for expert testimony on issues related to medicine supply chains in the US Congress and legislative bodies in other countries.
 Prashant obtained a PhD in Management Science from the University of Alabama and a Bachelor’s in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

Prof. Zeleke Mekonnen is a Professor of Medical Parasitology at the Institute of Health Sciences in Jimma University. He has immense teaching, research and community service experiences and assumed institutional responsibilities at local and international levels.

In addition to teaching & research, Prof. Zeleke has served in the university at various positions & has made successful contributions to the university & community at large that brought him to the level of full professorship at the University. Institutionally, he initiated & established Molecular Biology Research Centre & NTDs-laboratory at JU, which is currently one of the core research centre and providing research/teaching facilities across the university.

I am in my 2nd year MSc in Business Analytics, and I am assisting on the MIA research project. I am contributing by gathering, cleaning and analysing data in order to support the creation of system dynamics and simulation models, with the goal to better understand and describe from a quantitative perspective, the relation between shortages and sales levels of pharmaceuticals.