Professor Barbara McPake is a health economist specialising in health policy and health systems research. She has over 30 years of experience in these areas based in three UK university departments before moving to Australia in 2014.
Barbara is the current Director of the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, and a Professor of Global Health. She has undertaken a substantial portfolio of research work in the areas of health economics, health policy, health systems and human resources for health.
Barbara has been a leading member of a series of DFID research programmes including three successive Health Economics and Financing Programmes (1991-2005) and was Programme Director of the Health Systems Development Knowledge Programme (2001-2006), all commissioned while she was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
In all these programmes she focused on applying economic perspectives to overcoming the difficulties in extending the reach of health systems to the poorest. From 2011-2017, she was one of two Research Directors of the ReBuild Research Programme Consortium.
Also funded by DFID, ReBuild focuses on the lessons to be learned from the re-establishment of health systems in post-conflict settings and is working with partners in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia.