Dr Sheena Arora is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE) at the University of Technology Sydney.

She is a health economist with expertise in applied economic evaluation focusing on child and caregiver health.

Her work involves two areas:

• Health Technology Assessment –considerable experience in the economic evaluation of pharmaceutical products and medical devices through her work as senior evaluator for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee and Medical Services Advisory Committee.

• Research – with a focus on economic evaluations of psychosocial interventions in children and individuals with a disability. She is also involved as a health economist in a study evaluating a nurse-led intervention for survivors of childhood brain cancer.

Her PhD explored the economic implications of childhood intellectual disability.

She has considerable experience working with large-scale studies and has been involved in the design and implementation of trial based economic evaluations, including the design of data collection instruments, the application of linked data, costing of programs and evaluation of outcome data.

She has conducted complex economic data analyses using advanced statistical methods, including the use of panel data techniques and the design and analysis of discrete choice experiments.

“My family has many doctors, and I had an early interest in health and nutrition, so health economics became an obvious choice,” she said.