Dr Melissa Barber

Dr Melissa Barber is a health economist at the Yale Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency (CRRIT).

She holds a PhD in Population Health Science (Health Systems) from Harvard University. Her professional experience spans a range of global health actors, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM), the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), and the World Bank.

Her research seeks to tackle long-standing, neglected questions in pharmaceutical policy through transdisciplinary perspectives, creative research designs that leverage novel data sources, and new advances in causal inference methods. Her work has increased transparency across the pharmaceutical value chain, including by developing new methods for estimating medicine production costs, measuring fluctuations in upstream production markets, and standardizing clinical trial cost reporting. She has supported national procurement processes, competition investigations, and provided expert testimony before the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Senate Armed Services Committee. She is a Commissioner on The Lancet Commission on Accelerating Progress on Essential Medicines and a frequent contributor to WHO policy streams relating to supply chains, drug pricing, and the EML.