Jessica Ochalek joined the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) at the University of York in 2014.  She was awarded her  PhD on “Accounting for health opportunity costs in key decisions in healthcare resource allocation in low- and middle-income countries” by the University of York in 2023.   

 She has worked across sectors, in academia at Boston University and the nonprofit sector at the amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS research, and at different levels of healthcare provision, as an HIV/AIDS counsellor and lab technician at a clinic in Milwaukee (USA) and with international organisations and governments.  Through her research at the University of York she has collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP, Thailand), the Ministry of Health (Malawi), Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (Canada), and Institute of Economic Growth (India).

Dr. Ochalek is interested in the application of the principles and methods of economic evaluation to inform key questions in healthcare decision-making and resource allocation.  Her principle areas of research expertise are the estimation of the marginal cost per unit of health produced by healthcare systems; methods to inform health benefits package design and move toward universal health coverage; analysis of how the value of pharmaceuticals provided under universal coverage is shared between manufacturers and healthcare systems; and the economic evaluation of health technologies within healthcare and across sectors.   

She holds an MSc in Health Economics from the University of York, a MPH in Global Health from Boston University and a BA in Global Studies – Global Security from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, in addition to her PhD.