Welcome Amanda Glassman: CGD Director of Global Health Policy

I am pleased to announce that Amanda Glassman joins CGD today as the new director of CGD’s Global Health Policy program and a CGD research fellow. Amanda was chosen from a crowded field of highly qualified candidates, and I am delighted to welcome her to CGD.Amanda will be building upon the impressive legacy of Ruth Levine, our first director of Global Health Policy, who left the Center last March to take up a senior position USAID. Ruth was the lead author of Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health, which remains our best-selling book, and which spawned a cottage industry in such titles including Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development by our friends at the International Food Policy Research Institute.Ruth also initiated and led a working group on Advance Market Commitments for vaccines, which led to a $1.5 billion pilot program for a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease in developing countries, where three million children die annually of diseases caused by the bacterium.Perhaps as importantly, Ruth established the CGD working group model, which we have since applied to more than a dozen initiatives, several of which have achieved significant and lasting impacts to improve the lives of poor people in the developing world.So, as you can see, Amanda has big shoes to fill! Fortunately, she is superbly prepared to not only continue Ruth’s work but to take it to the next level.Amanda has worked for 15 years on health and social protection policy in the developing world, with particular attention to Latin America. She comes to us from the Inter-American Development Bank where she was the principal technical lead on health and designed, supervised and evaluated health and social protection programs. Before that she was deputy director for the Global Health Financing Initiative at Brookings, where she did policy research on aid effectiveness and domestic financing of health in low-income countries. She holds a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health; has published articles on poverty, health insurance and social protection; and is coauthor of From Few to Many: A Decade of Health Insurance Expansion in Colombia and The Health of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean.Besides these technical qualifications, Amanda has first-hand knowledge of the CGD working group approach, having served as a member of the Performance Based Incentives working group, one of several that Ruth initiated and chaired.  As importantly, she brings an openness to new ideas and collaborative learning that fit well with CGD’s approach to generating ideas and moving them into action—an approach that Ruth helped to pioneer, and which has since become such a crucial part of our DNA.Welcome, Amanda! And to our readers: watch this space!