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PhD highlights
Three PhD students graduated in 2019: Dwayne Boyers, Kevin Momanyi and Gillian Scanlon. Ben Sakowsky
defended his thesis (with minor corrections) in 2019. We welcomed two new PhD students to HERU in
2019: Mélanie Antunes and Huixuan Gao. Mélanie began her PhD studies under the Aberdeen–Curtin
Alliance PhD Programme. Mélanie will research ‘Public and patient preferences for social prescribing’, under the
supervision of Verity Watson and Marjon van der Pol from HERU, and Professor Suzanne Robinson and
Dr Richard Norman from Curtin University (Western Australia). Huixuan’s PhD explores the value and costs of
unpaid care for older people in China, under the supervision of Paul McNamee and Attakrit Leckcivilize.
Her PhD is funded by a University of Aberdeen Elphinstone Scholarship.

HERU Internships
During the summer we again welcomed three student interns. Internships are key to stimulating interest
in health economics and health economics research amongst economics students. Internships give a taste
of health economics research with interns working for six weeks alongside staff and students in HERU. The
student interns were Cameron Owens (University of Aberdeen), Jennifer Martin (University of Kent), Jeanne
Armand (University of Dundee).
We interviewed our 2019 summer interns in a HERU blog post and asked them about their experience of
working in HERU: www.abdn.ac.uk/heru/blog/heru-internship-experiences-2019/.
Many of our interns have gone on to pursue a career in health economics. We were delighted to welcome
back two previous interns as external seminar speakers in 2019:

• Elizabeth Lemmon, University of Stirling. Variations in domiciliary free personal care across Scottish local
authorities.
• Chiara Pastore, University of York. Human capital consequences of missing out on a grammar school
education.

Delivery of two courses in ‘Using Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) in
health economics: theoretical and practical issues’
This three-day course is aimed at individuals interested in preference elicitation and the application of DCEs
in health economics. The course includes practical sessions and group work using state-of-practice methods
and real-life examples.

Banff, Canada
In September, we ran the course in Banff, Canada.
The course was delivered by Mandy Ryan, Verity
Watson and Luis Loría-Rebolledo in collaboration
with Professor Deborah Marshall and her team from
the University of Calgary. We had 18 delegates from
a range of countries, including Canada, Malaysia,
USA and the UK, who provided lively debate and
discussion about the application of DCEs in health
economics. Our next joint Aberdeen-Calgary DCE
course will take place in Banff on 9th to 10th of
March 2021. Keep an eye on our website for more
details: www.abdn.ac.uk/heru/courses/workshops/

HERU ANNUAL REPORT 2019 23