Research assistantships 2020/21

Romario is currently pursuing an MSc in Global Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His background is in Biomedical Sciences, having completed a Bachelor of Science in this field at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. His primary research interest is strengthening health systems in LMICs, with a focus on capacity building to respond to the exponentially increasing disease burden stemming from non-communicable diseases. Other key areas of interest include improving access to social care in the Latin America and Caribbean region, neurodegenerative disease research, and UK pharmaceutical policies.  

He has experience in conducting primary and secondary research on the impacts of risk genes in Alzheimer’s disease and on the socioeconomic impacts on informal carers. Owing to his wider interest in this area and his commitment to improving patient outcomes, he has volunteered at a care facility in London that provides specialist care to dementia patients.

In his role as a research assistant at CPEC, he is working with Professor Martin Knapp to understand the roles and experiences of NGOs in the dementia policy making processes in various LMICs. This reseach aims to inform and improve the participation of different stakeholders in this field. 

Elaine is an MSc candidate on the Health Policy, Planning, and Financing programme at LSE and LSHTM, where she focuses on studying the health effects of social policies and the incentives built into the structures of health care systems. Prior to graduate school, she spent several years working in health informatics, analytics, and enterprise medical software implementation. She completed her undergraduate degree in the history and sociology of medicine at Wesleyan University in the United States.

Max is a research assistant at CPEC and a full-time MSc student in Applied Social Data Science at the LSE. He received a BA in Political Economy from Williams College in the US after which he spent four years in San Francisco, working for the Center for Effective Philanthropy's YouthTruth Survey, which aimed to improve K-12 students’ experiences in school using data. 

Max’s research interests include: education policy, rule compliance in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and quantitative text analysis.

Dulshani is a master's student in applied social data science at LSE. She currently works with Sam Rickman on using statistical analysis and natural-language processing to evaluate the effectiveness of health and social care services, including COVID-19 policies, for the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Adult Social Care.

Prior to starting her master's, she worked for four years in Trust and Safety at Facebook, where she developed a strong interest in applying computational methods to social problems. Her broader research interests include online political discourse, computational social science, and fairness in AI (artificial intelligence) systems. 

Tobias recently graduated with a BSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (EME) from LSE and is working as a Research Assistant within the Adult Social Care Research Unit (ASCRU) at CPEC. He has research interests in the fields of health, environmental, and development economics. Tobias is currently assisting Dr Fernández with the analysis of the effects of certain policies on rates of COVID-19 in care homes.

Disha is currently ​completing an MSc in International Health Policy (Health Economics) at LSE. Prior to this, she was based in Singapore, where she led health and medtech investments for an early-stage venture capital fund. Whilst there, she developed her interest in incentives and inequalities in healthcare provision, the evaluation of new medical technologies and therapeutics, and innovative financing mechanisms for healthcare innovations focused on improving affordability, accessibility, and outcomes.

She is a research assistant on the STRiDE project, which aims to strengthen responses to dementia in developing countries. Disha holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from Trinty College Dublin.