Chief of DGHA Health Economics, Systems and Integration Branch:John Blandford, PhD

Dr. John Blandford is chief of the Division of Global HIV/AIDS (DGHA) Health Economics, Systems, and Integration Branch (HESIB) in the CDC Center for Global Health (CGH). Since joining the division in 2003, he has established DGHA’s leadership in the use of economic research and financial analyses to support sustainable scale-up and efficient operation of global PEPFAR programs. He directed the PEPFAR ART Costing Project, a multi-country public health evaluation to study the costs and cost drivers of PEPFAR’s treatment programs. He has grown the economics team to support PEPFAR in planning and optimization of resources in global HIV programming and has pioneered routine expenditure analyses to inform program management and efficiency.

For two years, Dr. Blandford was seconded to the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, where he led public health evaluation activities and guided efforts to project resource needs for scale-up of PEPFAR programs. He entered federal service as a postdoctoral Prevention Effectiveness Fellow in CDC’s Division of STD Prevention. Prior to joining CDC, he worked in the philanthropic sector supporting grant review and grant-making operations and as an adjunct instructor of undergraduate and graduate courses in economic theory and public policy. Dr. Blandford received his graduate training in economics at the University of Texas (Austin) and University of Notre Dame, and was a Social Science Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.