Dr Kalipso Chalkidou is the director of global health policy for the Centre for Global Development, based in London, and a Professor of Practice in Global Health at Imperial College London. Her work concentrates on helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for using evidence to inform health policy as they move towards Universal Healthcare Coverage. She is interested in how local institutions can drive scientific and legitimate healthcare resource allocation decisions. She has been involved in the Chinese rural health reforms and in national health reform projects in Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, PAHO, DFID and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as national governments.

Kalipso led the establishment of NICE International for 8 years, and, more recently, as director of the international Decision Support Initiative, a multi-million multi-country network working towards better health around the world through evidence-informed spending in healthcare in low to middle income countries.

She holds a doctorate on the molecular biology of prostate cancer from the University of Newcastle (UK), an MD (Hons) from the University of Athens and is a visiting Professor at King’s College London and an adjunct professor at Griffith University in Australia. She has held visiting positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, sits on several journal editorial boards and has published over 100 peer reviewed papers and book chapters.