Dr. Yan Wang is a visiting scholar at Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for 2009-2010. Her research focuses on tobacco control, primary health care system, health education and health promotion, and health insurance. She is currently also the group manager of Division of Grass-Root Health Services, Shandong Provincial Health Department, P.R.China, and is in charge of urban community health services, health education and health promotion. She has an MA in public health from Shandong Medical University and PhD in Social Medicine and Health Management from Shandong University. Dr. Yan Wang has been an adjunct professor at Weifang Medical University since 2008. She also engaged in academic association and public organizations related to health affair.

Dr. Brian Chen is currently a visiting scholar with the Asia Health Policy Program and Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University. He was recently Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center's 2009-2010 postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Health Policy. As a visiting scholar, Dr. Chen will conduct collaborative research about health of the elderly and chronic disease in China.

As an applied economist, Chen’s research focuses on the impact of incentives in health care organizations on provider and patient behavior. For his dissertation, Chen empirically examined how vertical integration and prohibition against self-referrals affected physician prescribing behavior. His job market paper was selected for presentation at the American Law and Economics Association’s Annual Meeting, the Academy of Management, the Canadian Law and Economics Association, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, and the First Annual Conference on Empirical Health Law and Policy at Georgetown Law Center in 2009.  The paper was also nominated for best paper based on a dissertation at the Academy of Management.

Chen comes to the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center not only with a multidisciplinary law and economics background, but also with an international perspective from having lived and worked in Taiwan, Japan, and France. He has a particularly intimate knowledge of the Taiwanese health care system from his experience as an assistant to the hospital administrator at a medical college in Taiwan.

During his past residence as a postdoctoral fellow with the Asia Health Policy Program, Chen conducted empirical research on cost containment policies in Taiwan and Japan and how those policies impacted provider behavior. His work also contributed to the program’s research activities on comparative health systems and health service delivery in the Asia-Pacific, a theme that encompasses the historical evolution of health policies; the role of the private sector and public-private partnerships; payment incentives and their impact on patients and providers; organizational innovation, contracting, and soft budget constraints; and chronic disease management and service coordination for aging populations.

Dr. Brian Chen recently completed his Ph.D. in Business Administration in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. He received a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1997, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1992.

Currently Dr. Kaarboe is working as an associate professor in economics at Department of Economics, University of Bergen, Norway. He also serves as the research director of the research group Health Economics Bergen (HEB).

Dr. Kaarboe's research has mainly been focused on developing and implementing financing models in the health care sector. This includes i) theoretical work, ii) developing remuneration models at the nation level, and iii) developing and implementing remuneration models at the regional level in Norway. He has also been involved in a WHO-project on implementing decentralization in health care. Recently Dr. Kaarboe was the Principal Investigator (PI) for a project on evaluation of a Norwegian hospital reform. This reform concerns a major change in the governance structure of the hospital sector in Norway. Currently Dr. Kaarboe is the PI of a project on prioritization in the hospital sector. The main purpose of the project is to develop a surveillance system to monitor prioritization of hospital patients. One part of the project includes a comparative analysis of prioritization practices in Norway and Scotland. He is also involved in a project about the relationship between social capital and health.

The health economics group in Bergen is one of the larger health research groups in Europe. The research group is based within economics and business administration but emphasizes multidisciplinary research cooperation with medicine, health care institutions and other social sciences. It has a broad international (European) network. Well known health economics like Professors Andrew Jones, (York), Carol Propper (Imperial College/Bristol University), John Cairns (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Matt Sutton (University of Manchester), Sherman Folland (Oakland University) and Maarten Lindeboom (Vrije University) are all affiliated with the health group.