Professor Jolene Skordis
Bloomsbury Director
Prof Skordis is a Professor of Economics, specialising in health and development. She is Vice-Dean (International and Advancement) for UCL’s Faculty of Population Health Sciences, Head of the Department of Environment and Community Health, Chair of the European Global Health Research Institutes Network and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future of Work. Her work has directly influenced government policy in a range of countries.
Professor Hassan Haghparast-Bidgoli
Bloomsbury Director
Prof Haghparast-Bidgoli is the co-Director of UCL’s Centre for Global Health Economics. He has over 20 years’ experience in health economics, focusing on health system efficiency and financing, health inequalities and economic evaluation of health interventions.
Dr Neha Batura
Bloomsbury Director
Dr Neha Batura is the co-Director of UCL’s Centre for Global Health Economics and Associate Professor of Health Economics at UCL. She has over a decade’s experience economic evaluation of health interventions, inequalities and inequity in health, and exploring barriers to and facilitators of successful uptake of interventions.
Gerard Abou Jaoude
Bloomsbury Director
Gerard Abou Jaoude has extensive experience working on the development and application of costing and resource optimisation tools such as Optima TB and HIPtool to inform health benefits package design. He has also worked on health financing for HIV, TB and Malaria in West and Central Africa and is a fluent French speaker.
About Us
Bloomsbury Policy Lab Ltd is an academic collective established in 2022, that draws on experienced researchers from across the Bloomsbury Colleges of London. Through a flexible and innovative structure, we bridge the gap between academia and policymakers, providing expert analysis and strategic insights into global health, health systems and health financing.
Founded by Professor Jolene Skordis, Bloomsbury Policy Lab is led by a team of Directors including Professor Hassan Haghparast-Bidgoli, Dr Neha Batura, Gerard Abou Jaoude and Tom Palmer.
Together, the Directors have more than 50 years of collective experience and have worked extensively with major international organisations including the Global Fund, the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, as well as directly with national governments.
Our expertise spans the disciplines of Economics, Epidemiology, Public Health, Mathematics and Statistics - although access to other specialists is facilitated by Bloomsbury Policy Lab’s unique network. Bloomsbury Policy Lab’s flexible structure also allows us to respond rapidly to policy-focused work and short term advisory needs. We are committed to delivering rigorous evidence, expert analysis and tailored strategic support.
In addition to the core Directors, a team of experienced consulting academics contribute as needed.
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Dr Ana Correa-Ossa
Bloomsbury Consultant
Dr Ana Correa-Ossa is co-director of the Health Economics and Decision Science MSc programme. Her work integrates economic analysis with public health to address pressing global challenges, including health inequalities, infectious diseases, and more efficient and effective health systems. Ana is fluent in Spanish.
Dr Kasim Alell
Bloomsbury Consultant
Dr Kasim has led projects on the burden of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, including Tuberculosis, using compartmental mathematical models and epidemiological approaches to tailor cost-saving interventions. Kasim has performed within highly multidisciplinary teams to find the most cost-effective TB and RR-TB treatment schemes in South Africa and evaluations of outreach strategies for early diagnosis in Italy and Romania to assess the value for money.
Dr Asad Zaidi
Bloomsbury Consultant
Dr Asad Zaidi is a Fulbright scholar and clinical epidemiologist with several years of experience in public health research and program management in Pakistan. He served as the Chief Operating Officer of Community Health Solutions in Pakistan, a non-profit social enterprise to scale and sustain TB case-detection in the private sector, in collaboration with the NTP.
Dr Francesco Salustri
Bloomsbury Consultant
Dr Francesco Salustri is Assistant Professor of Economics at Roma Tre University and Honorary Lecturer at UCL. He has extensive research experience in behavioural and health economics and has collaborated with several institutions including the OECD, the UNIDO and the Italian Ministry for Environment. Francesco is a fluent French speaker.
