Kirsten Howard is a Co-Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics and Professor of Health Economics in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on methodological and applied health economics approaches and how these can inform decision making at an individual and policy level. Her research interests include assessment of patient, consumer and public preferences for health and healthcare using discrete choice methods, health technology decision making, and measurement and valuation of quality of life using economic and choice-based methods. She also has expertise in economic evaluation and decision modelling.
Kirsten has led the economic evaluations of a large number of intervention trials in kidney disease and falls prevention, and has conducted many discrete choice experiments of patient, consumer and public preferences in areas as diverse as cancer screening, including benefit harm trade-offs, labour induction, aged care services, exercise interventions for older people, dialysis services and organ donation and allocation policy. Kirsten is also Chair of the Economics Sub Committee of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) and a PBAC member.