The NICE International team

Kalipso Chalkidou is the founding director of NICE's international programme, helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for using evidence to inform health policy. She is interested in how local information, local expertise and local institutions can drive scientific and legitimate healthcare resource allocation decisions. She has been involved in the Chinese rural health reform and also in national health reform projects in Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, PAHO, DFID and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as national governments.

She holds a doctorate on the molecular biology of prostate cancer from the University of Newcastle (UK), an MD (Hons) from the University of Athens and is an honorary senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), a senior advisor on international policy at the Center for Medical Technology Policy (USA) and visiting faculty at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute for Bioethics. Between 2007 and 2008, she spent a year at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, as a Harkness fellow in Health Policy and Practice, studying how comparative effectiveness research can inform policy and US government drug pricing policies.

Francoise Cluzeau is a senior adviser for NICE International where she leads on several projects. She has worked with the Ministries of Health in Turkey, Georgia, Brazil, India, China, Kenya and Tunisia in the context of their Health Quality Improvement Programmes. She is the NICE International lead for the Joint Learning Network (JLN) quality track.

For six years she was the technical adviser to the NICE Guidelines Programme. She led the AGREE collaboration of 19 countries that originally developed the AGREE Instrument. She is the chair of the AGREE Research Trust (ART) and a member of the Advisory Group for the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) She worked for five years in Africa on demographic and public health projects funded by the Overseas Development Agency (now DFID) and the US State Department.

A psychology graduate by training, she holds a masters' degree in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a doctorate in Health Services Research from the University of London. She has published extensively in the field of clinical guidelines and retains a part-time lectureship at St George's University of London where she remains active in research.

Derek Cutler is Assistant Project Manager for NICE International, responsible for providing administrative and logistical support, and is the communications lead for the programme. He has provided support to a number of policy advice projects, including work with Ministries of Health of China, Colombia and Georgia. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and presented at international conferences discussing how low and middle income countries may incorporate evidence and social values in their healthcare decision-making processes. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and is currently studying for an MSc in International Development.

Reetan Patel is Programme Manager for NICE International, responsible for providing clients with strategy and process advice on the institutionalising evidence-informed policy making and negotiating and managing contracts with clients. He has a BSc (Hons) in Business Information Systems and joined NICE, shortly after graduating in 2004. He has since worked in a number different Centres and roles at the Institute and has experience of managing a wide range of projects both nationally and internationally.

Francis Ruiz joined the NICE International team as a senior adviser after previously working in the Guidelines team at NICE as a technical adviser since July 2006, and before then within the Institute's Technology Appraisal programme as an analyst from July 2003. He has a specialist interest in health economics and has worked on a number of technology appraisals and guidelines in a variety of therapeutic areas. Prior to joining NICE, Francis had over six years experience in clinical data management and health economics within the pharmaceutical sector. Francis graduated with a BSc in physiology from the University of Dundee in 1993. He also holds a post-graduate diploma in psychology from the Royal Holloway (University of London) and an MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Hygiene/London School of Economics.