Research Associate
Biography
Dr Olga Löblová is a political scientist working on health policy. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Sociology, working on Dr Stuart Hogarth’s CancerScreen project. In 2019-2020, she held a Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellowship in parallel to her postdoc and is currently pursuing an independent project on “shadow expertise”.
In August 2020, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science, which she will begin in 2021.
Olga's research focuses on the political economy of resource allocation in health care and the role of experts and evidence in health policy-making. She studies how the varying institutional contexts, diverse configurations of actors’ interests and expertise, as well as different forms of evidence, determine which health technologies and interventions are publicly funded in today’s health systems. Specifically, she researches the politics of health technology assessment (HTA) in health care reimbursement decisions. In CancerScreen, she has studied the regulation of molecular diagnostics and governance of cancer screening. She uses mainly qualitative methods in her research: in the past years, she carried out over 140 in-depth interviews in the United Kingdom, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and in Brussels. Her work has been published e.g. in Policy Studies Journal; Social Science & Medicine; Comparative European Politics; and Health Policy. See her Google Scholar profile for full list of publications.
Olga holds a PhD from Central European University (2016; Public Policy track) and MA degrees from the College of Europe (2010) and Sciences Po Paris (2009).
Olga is involved in teaching on the MPhil in Sociology and on the Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS) Tripos. Prior to joining Cambridge she was a visiting assistant professor at the School of Public Policy, Central European University, a visiting lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, collège universitaire de Dijon (2014-2016), and a visiting professor at College of Europe, Bruges, where she developed and taught a workshop in professional development in European Health, Consumer and Risk Policy (2015, 2016, 2021). She also has past experience as a consultant in European and global health policy, and in Brussels pharmaceutical lobbying.
Research
Health policy, regulation, politics of healthcare reimbursement decisions, health technology assessment, diagnostics.
