Theo Vos

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Theo Vos is Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is a key member of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) research team, and is working to improve the GBD methods, update sources of data, and develop partnerships with countries to produce GBD estimates that are most relevant to policy decision-making. He is also focused on linking the epidemiological estimates from GBD to information on health expenditure and cost effectiveness.

Prior to joining IHME, Dr. Vos was Director of the Centre for Burden of Disease and Cost-Effectiveness at the School of Population Health of the University of Queensland. While there, he led burden of disease studies in Australia and contributed to studies in Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

Previously, Dr. Vos led two large economic evaluation projects. The Assessing Cost-Effectiveness in Prevention project, or ACE Prevention, was conducted in Australia and was the most comprehensive evaluation of disease prevention measures ever conducted in a country. A similar project, Setting Priorities Using Information on Cost-Effectiveness (SPICE), examined intervention options for tuberculosis, mental disorders, lifestyle risk factors, and road traffic injuries in Thailand.

Dr. Vos received his PhD in epidemiology and health economics from Erasmus University and his medical degree from State University Groningen, both in the Netherlands. He also studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he obtained an MSc in Public Health in Developing Countries.