Professor Mandy Ryan

Biography

Mandy is Emeritus Professor at the Health Economics Research Unit. She joined HERU in 1987 after graduating from the University of Leicester with a BA (Hons) in Economics and the University of York with an MSc in Health Economics. In 1995, she graduated from the University of Aberdeen with a PhD in Economics concerned with the application of contingent valuation and discrete choice experiments (DCEs) in health economics. In 1997, Mandy was awarded a five-year Medical Research Council Non-Clinical Senior Fellowship to develop and apply Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) in healthcare. In 2002, she was awarded a Personal Chair in Health Economics by the University of Aberdeen and in 2006 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Mandy was Director of HERU from April 2013 to July 2024.

Mandy's research interests focus on taking a person-centred approach to valuation in health economics. She is known for her work challenging the clinical approach to valuation that is often adopted by health economists and for developing alternative person-centred approaches. She introduced DCEs into health economics in the early 1990s and her research has applied DCEs in a wide range of contexts to take account of the user preferences in the delivery of healthcare.