Health and Global Change Project (HGC)

IIASA’s Health and Global Change (HGC) project is an exploratory activity which studies links between global change, human health, and health systems. Researchers affiliated with HGC have disparate interests, with the result that the project is interested in applications from a very broad range of young researchers.

Landis MacKellar, HGC Project leader, an economist, is interested in supervising students who are working on the application of systems modelling techniques to urban health. This might take the form of applying national health accounts approaches at the urban level; alternatively, it might involve a broader effort to model human health and health system outcomes at the level of the city. Mr. MacKellar, who has a particular interest in the history of crime, would also encourage applications from

• students with demonstrable experience in analysing U.S. mortality data who would be interested in contributing to a historical study of mortality in U.S. prisons or
• students with demonstrable experience in analysing WHO mortality data who would be interested in contributing to a historical study of worldwide homicide mortality.

Andrew Noymer of HGC and the University of California at Irvine, a demographer, would be interested in supervising YSSP students working on the following subject areas:

• The statistical analysis of time series of mortality from diseases with seasonal peaks, especially influenza and pneumonia;
• Any topic in social epidemiology, broadly defined, especially including, but not limited to, immigrant health;
• Any topic in historical epidemiology, broadly defined, and in any time period from the fourteenth century to the recent past.

Steven Ney of HGC and Singapore Management University, a political scientist, is interested in supervising students who wish to apply the health systems approach, i.e. the systematic comparison of institutional arrangements for health care provision. Possible projects might identify the constraints that particular families of health systems impose on health sector reform, or look at the way ideas and knowledge shape the health reform agenda. Overall, the proposed research should aim to compare potential reform pathways as well as understand processes of institutional learning, generating a framework capable of comparing reform and institutional learning processes in both the developed and the developing worlds. Steven Ney would encourage applications from students with an interest in:

• comparing health systems in a specific region (i.e. Southeast Asia; East Asia; North Africa, etc.)
• the changing role of international organisations (such as the World Bank or the WHO) in national and regional health system reform;
• the contribution of health care reform to overall socio-economic and political development.

Clara Cohen, a biologist, of HGC, is interested in supervising YSSP students working on the following subject areas:

• Urban health
• Water and health
• Agriculture, nutrition, and health
• Health policy formulation and implementation (e.g., immunization policy, HIV/AIDS policy, pandemic flu preparedness policy, etc.)

Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact HGC researchers directly at Landis MacKellar (mckellar@iiasa.ac.at), Andrew Noymer (noymer@iiasa.ac.at), Steven Ney (stevenney@smu.edu.sg) and Clara Cohen (cohen@iiasa.ac.at) to discuss possibilities prior to application.

For more information, please see the HGC webpage.

Responsible for this page: Tanja Huber
Last updated: 03 Oct 2011