Mead Over

Mead Over is a senior fellow emeritus at the Center for Global Development researching economics of efficient, effective, and cost-effective health interventions in developing countries. Much of his work since 1987, first at the World Bank and now at the CGD, is on the economics of the AIDS epidemic. After work on the economic impact of the AIDS epidemic and on cost-effective interventions, he co-authored the Bank’s first comprehensive treatment of the economics of AIDS in the book, Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities for a Global Epidemic (1997,1999). His most recent book is Achieving an AIDS Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment (2011)in which he offers options, for donors, recipients, activists and other participants in the fight against HIV, to reverse the trend in the epidemic through better prevention. His previous publications include The Economics of Effective AIDS Treatment: Evaluating Policy Options for Thailand (2006). Other papers examine the economics of preventing and of treating malaria. In addition to ongoing work on the determinants of adherence to AIDS treatment in poor countries, he is working on optimal pricing of health care services at the periphery, on the measurement and explanation of the efficiency of health service delivery in poor countries and on optimal interventions to control a global influenza pandemic.

In addition to his numerous research projects at the Center, Over currently serves as a member of PEPFAR’s Scientific Advisory Board and as a member of the Steering Committee of the HIV/AIDS modeling consortium funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

After leaving college, Over served in the US Peace Corps’ first program in Burkina Faso, where he worked with villagers in the construction of 25 water wells. While earning his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he spent one year as a Foreign Scholar in the Economics Department of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). After leaving Madison, he taught health economics, development economics, applied microeconomics and econometrics as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and the Center for Development at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts from 1975 through 1981 and as an Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University from 1981 through 1985, where he also held the position of Associate Professor of Public Health.

Recruited to the World Bank as a Health Economist in 1986, Mead Over advanced to the position of Lead Health Economist in the Development Research Group, before leaving the World Bank to join the Center for Global Development in 2006. Each spring since 2005, he has taught a module on “Modeling the Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions against Infectious Diseases” as part of the master’s degree program in health economics for developing countries at the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International (CERDI) at the University of the Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France.