Get To Know Us
DARTH is a multi-institutional, multi-university collaborative effort comprised of researchers who have a passion for transparent and open-source solutions to decision analysis in health. The aim of this collaboration is to expand knowledge in decision analysis using R and develop educational material that empowers people to construct R-based decision models.
Petros Pechlivanoglou, PhD, is a Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children’s Research Institute and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. After studying economics in his native Greece, he received both a Master’s in econometrics and a PhD in health econometrics from the University of Groningen. His research interests include: the use of health decision analysis in economic evaluation; bridging evidence synthesis, administrative data and decision analysis; and the application and extension of predictive models in health economics. In his spare time, he enjoys playing and performing traditional Greek music and explaining to people how to pronounce his last name.
Eva Enns, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, in the division of Health Policy and Management. She has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and holds both a Master’s and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She develops mathematical models of the spread of infectious diseases that help evaluate strategies aimed at mitigating disease impact through prevention and/or treatment. Her aim is to inform better infectious disease prevention, management, and control policies as well as to develop new methodologies or tools to better address issues surrounding infectious disease outbreaks.
Fernando Alarid-Escudero, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) and a master’s degree in Economics from the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), both in Mexico City, and holds a PhD in health decision sciences from the University of Minnesota. He wants to live in an open-source world where academic & scientific developments are transparent, shareable, and improvable. He likes integrating methods from different disciplines, such as statistics, engineering, economics, and epidemiology, to implement decision-analytic models in R.
Eline Krijkamp, MSc, has a paradoxical relationship with choice: she doesn’t like having to make choices and yet, she is very enthusiastic about modelling choices in healthcare. As a Master’s student, she joined the DARTH crew and focused on how to build microsimulation models in R. She holds a Master’s in Epidemiology from the Netherlands Institute of Health Sciences and a Master’s in Health Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is currently a PhD student in epidemiology at the Netherlands Institue of Health Sciences. Right now, she is building a decision model to predict the best choice for her future career path.
Hawre Jalal, PhD, MD is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Economic at the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on using mathematical modeling, cost-effective analyses and econometrics approaches to address health policy and resource allocation questions. His current research involves modeling the opioid-epidemic, bladder cancer modeling and evaluating their mitigation strategies. Hawre’s methodological interests involve value of information analysis, Bayesian calibration using artificial neural networks, and communicating uncertainty to decision makers using metamodeling.
Alan Yang, MSc, holds a Master of Science in Biostatistics and a Honours Bachelor of Science in Statistics from the University of Toronto. He is currently working in Child Health Evaluative Sciences at the Hospital for Sick Children focusing on implementations of decision analysis in the R software and statistical applications for health economics. During his graduate studies, he worked at St. Michael’s Hospital, where he conducted survival and longitudinal data analyses on observational studies. His areas of interest include decision analysis, R programming, survival analysis and simulation modeling.
Myriam Hunink, MD, PhD, has been between fields and unable to choose which fits best since she started studying! She has a BSc in applied mathematics, an MD degree, a PhD in health decision sciences, and she is a radiologist. She fulfills multiple positions: she is a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Radiology at the Erasmus Medical Center (Erasmus MC) Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Director of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences at the Erasmus MC; Visiting professor at UMIT – University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Hall. i.T., Austria; and Adjunct Professor of Health Decision Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, USA. Her vision is to optimize medical decisions by combining the best-available quantitative evidence on risks and benefits with patient values, preferences, quality of life, and costs. Her current research efforts aim to improve healthcare by increasing the well-being and resilience of healthcare professionals.