Victoria Fan

Dr. Victoria Fan is a health economist and data scientist working in the areas of health policy and global health. She joined the Center for Global Development as a senior fellow in 2022, and is an associate professor of health policy (with tenure, on leave) in the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is also an adjunct senior fellow at the East West Center, and serves as Councillor (2022-2025) for the Alumni Association of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

She founded and established the Pacific Health Analytics Collaborative (PHAC), a UH lab working in partnership with state government on health systems, health analytics, and behavioral health. At PHAC, she led a team of faculty and student researchers to develop Hawaii's first and second generation versions of the Hawaii Behavioral Health Dashboard. She was the founder and chair of the Hawaii Pandemic Applied Modeling (HiPAM) work group. She also served as executive director and principal investigator of Hawaii CARES, a 24/7 integrated behavioral health crisis and mental health call center that was founded in 2019 in partnership with the Hawaii Department of Health and administered by the University of Hawaii. She received the Luminary Award from Hawaii-Alaska Chapter of Health Informatics and Management Systems (HIMSS) for her data and analytics work during the COVID-19 pandemic. As director of PHAC, she has raised over $18M over 2014-20 and oversaw 120+ employees, 9 junior faculty, 4 administrative staff, and numerous undergraduate and graduate student employees.

Her academic contributions in health economics and health systems have identified the health financing transition, landscaped the health workforce in China and India, and evaluated financing and payment in health systems. She has written papers on aid effectiveness and value for money of development assistance for health. Her work using impact evaluation and economic evaluation in health have assessed the costs and benefits of health interventions and health risks, including pandemic influenza, social policy, diabetes prevention, dental sealants, and end-of-life care. She has been invited as a guest speaker by, or given advice to, multilateral institutions (e.g. UNICEF and WHO) as well as national governments (e.g. China, India, South Korea, Thailand). 

She previously served as a fellow at the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She has worked with nongovernmental organizations in Asia (BRAC, SEWA, Tzu Chi) and at units at Harvard University (Harvard Initiative for Global Health, Harvard Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University Program for Health Care Financing). She served as a consultant for the China Medical Board, World Bank and World Health Organization and on studies supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

She earned her doctor and master of science in global health and population from Harvard School of Public Health and bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studied engineering at MIT to work on appropriate technologies in developing countries with major public health impacts. She later pursued health systems, evaluative sciences, and health economics at Harvard School of Public Health. She is born and raised in Hawaii. 

You may connect with her on Twitter at @FanVictoria. She blogs at the Center for Global Development Development Blog.