Kalipso Chalkidou is the founding Head of the Department of Health Finance at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, based in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a Visiting Professor of Global Health at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London.

Prior to the Global Fund, she was Director of Global Health Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, based in London. Her past work has concentrated on helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for using evidence to inform health policy as they move towards Universal Healthcare Coverage. She is interested in how local information, local expertise and local institutions can drive scientific and legitimate healthcare resource allocation decisions. She has been involved in the Chinese rural health reforms and in national health reform projects in Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, PAHO, DFID and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as national governments.

Between 2007 and 2008, she spent a year at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, as a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy and Practice, studying USG drug pricing policies.

Kalipso founded NICE International which she led for 8 years, and, more recently, of the international Decision Support Initiative (iDSI) which she directs and which is a multi-million multi-country network working towards better health around the world through evidence-informed spending in healthcare in low to middle income countries. With iDS, she has been involved in national reform projects in China, India, Vietnam, Ghana, Indonesia, Rwanda and South Africa working together with key national organisations such as the Thai Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP) and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI).

She holds a doctorate on the molecular biology of prostate cancer from the University of Newcastle (UK), an MD (Hons) from the University of Athens and is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and an adjunct professor at Griffith University in Australia. She has held visiting positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, sits on several journal editorial boards and has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters (Google Scholar).

She sits on the Board of Consilium Scientific.