FELICIA MARIE KNAUL
(January 2009)
In 2007, Felicia Knaul was diagnosed with breast cancer and in 2008she designed and founded Cáncer de Mama: Tómatelo a Pecho(Breast Cancer: Take it to Heart) a program sponsored by theCarso Health Institute that undertakes and promotes research,advocacy, awareness and early detection initiatives on breastcancer in Latin America.
She is Senior Economist at the Mexican HealthFoundation, a non-profit organization devoted to sector-wide policyanalysis. She heads the program on Health and Competitivenessthat includes directing a multi-disciplinary team of researchersand working with a 15-person board composed of leading businesspeoplein Mexico. She is also Principal Investigator and Director ofa multi-country study of financial protection and health financingthat is funded by IDRC-Canada. This project includes over 20researchers from seven LAC countries and is being extended tofive additional countries in the region.
As senior advisor to the recently-formed CARSO HealthInstitute, she leads several projects including the HealthObservatory (an inter-institutional initiative with the MexicanHealth Foundation to analyze health system performance in theLAC region).
Felicia has made numerous presentationson her personal experience and published both testimonies andresearch on the topic. Most recently, she authored ¨I am a womanwho lives with breast cancer¨ and co-authored ¨Breast cancer inMexico: a pressing priority¨ published in the special issue onreproductive cancers of the international journal ReproductiveHealth Matters. She is currently editing a special, internationaledition of the journal Salud Pública de México on breast cancer.
She has held senior government posts at the Ministriesof Education and Social Development in Mexico and at theDepartment of Planning of Colombia. She has also worked for anumber of international institutions including the World HealthOrganization (WHO), the World Bank, the Inter-AmericanDevelopment Bank and UNICEF. In Mexico, she has worked as aprofessor of economics at the Center for Research and Teaching inEconomics in Mexico City and for the Mexican Social SecurityInstitute. She was also a member of theMexican Commission onMacroeconomics and Health and served on Working Group 1 of theWHO International Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.
In 2008, she was a member of the Advisory Board of theworking group on Global Health for the Clinton Global Initiative.She also holds seats on the Strategic Consultative Committee forthe Office for Mexico and Central America of the DavidRockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at HarvardUniversity, the Consultative Council of UNICEF in Mexico (since2003), and on the boards of the Harvard-Mexico Foundation andthe Mexican Council on Competitiveness (since 2005). She has beena member of the National System of Researchers of Mexico since1998 (Level 2) and holds an academic appointment at the Centrefor Health Systems Research of the National Institute for PublicHealth in Cuernavaca Mexico. In 2007, she was appointed NonresidentFellow at the Brookings Institute working with the HealthFinancing Task Force, and an associate of the Center forInternational Health of the University of Toronto. She is a memberof the editorial boards of the International Social SecurityReviewand of Health Policy and Planning.
Her analytic and policy work focuses on health financing,health and the economy, health system reform, financial protectionin health, breast cancer and health care utilization, women andhealth, ageing and health systems, as well as on education and childlabor. She has worked on these topics in Mexico, Latin America andat the global level. She has published extensively in the fields ofeconomics of health and education, and on the subject of childrenin especially difficult circumstances and on education for childrenliving with illness. She has more than 100 publications, including anumber of articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as severalbooks and book chapters. She has also collaborated on institutionalpublications, both in Mexico and with international organizations,such as the ¨WHO World Health Report 2000¨, the ¨MexicoNational Action Plan for Children and Youth 2002-2010¨ and the¨National Social Development Program 2001-6¨. Her work onfinancial protection in health in Mexico, co-authored withcolleagues and students based at the Mexican Health Foundation,won first prize in the 2005 international competition of the GlobalDevelopment Network, Global Development Awards for OutstandingResearch on Development in the category Institutional Developmentand Change in the Health Sector. She also chaired The LancetHealth System Reform in Mexico Series Steering Committee in2006 and co-authored two of the seven papers that were publishedin the series.
Her B.A. is in Economics and International Development fromthe University of Toronto, and she holds a Masters and Ph.D. inEconomics from HarvardUniversity.
A Canadian, she has participated in projects on social andhuman development in a number of countries including Colombia,Guatemala, Jamaica, Bolivia, Thailand, India, the Philippines and theDominican Republic.
She resides in Mexico City with her husband and daughtersHannah and Mariana Havivah.