Tell us something of your background. How come you ended up at SSE?

Canadian by birth, I spent over a decade working in diverse clinical, strategic and operational healthcare roles in the United States before making a home in Sweden. My background in healthcare has joined work experience in complex health systems with rigorous, interdisciplinary training. This has been an important precursor to my pursuit of a PhD, a natural evolution of my career which will enable me to better understand and contribute to systemic transformations in healthcare.

My career has centered on the clinical, operational, policy and leadership aspects of large healthcare systems facing pressures to change and improve. I earned dual undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania - a BSc. Economics from Wharton and BSN from the School of Nursing. I started my career as a registered nurse in the demanding settings of organ transplantation and the operating room, gaining critical insights into the layered, and oftentimes competing, clinical and business dimensions of healthcare models. From Harvard I earned a cross-disciplinary master’s degree (MPH) in health management, policy and public health. Following, I worked alongside hospital leadership teams at leading US medical centers (Mayo Clinic, Boston Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital) to support the wholesale redesign of health processes and systems and to forward new models of care, all within uniquely collaborative decision-making models.

My journey to SSE was guided by personal and professional aims. For my Swedish husband and I, Sweden presents a culturally-rich environment in which to raise our young family, where we enjoy proximity to both scenic nature and a thriving business ecosystem. At the Stockholm School of Economics, which has a long tradition of supporting independent research that addresses important societal challenges and has forged strong connections between research and practice, I see an ideal training ground to develop as a researcher and future educator in Swedish and European healthcare.

What are your research interests and what do you wish to investigate in your dissertation?

My research interests follow from an idealism aimed at achieving healthier populations. To this end, I am interested in researching the systemic transformations required of healthcare systems to deliver measurably improved results and adapt to future challenges: How do we adapt healthcare systems to achieve healthier populations? How can we best "future proof" healthcare systems through anticipatory, responsive and resilient operations and organization?

In my dissertation, I intend to investigate the connection between healthcare and health - and the levers that might permit national, publicly funded healthcare systems to best achieve improved health of populations - with a focus on leadership, organization, governance and systems-wide innovations within publicly funded healthcare systems.

On a less professional level, what other interests do you have? How do you spend your time when you are free?

At this stage of my life, I enjoy viewing the world through the eyes of my two, young children and spending time outside in nature, be it on walks through the forest, cross-country skiing in the mountains, or being by the water. I combine these interests through amateur explorations in photography, capturing fleeting aspects of life and nature that awe and inspire me.