Beate Sander, RN MBA MEcDev PhD, is Director of Population Health Economics Research (PHER) at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and Director of Health Modeling & Health Economics at the Toronto Health Economics and Technology Assessment collaborative (THETA). She provides scientific advice to decision makers and serves on scientific working groups and advisory bodies, including Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), where she also chairs the Economics Task Group. She is a Scientific Co-Chair of the Canadian Lyme Disease Research Network. Dr. Sander is Vice President of the Society of Medical Decision Making and an editorial board member of the Medical Decision Making journal.

Dr. Sander's research program in the economics of infectious diseases addresses challenges to economic evaluation methods by advancing scientific methods for the economic evaluation of infectious disease interventions at the population level, while developing critical evidence to inform policy making in important disease areas: COVID-19, viral hepatitis, vector-borne diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Her research encompasses the following domains:

  1. Advance economic evaluation by developing novel methods for a systems approach that identifies and optimizes intervention strategies across sectors, fully accounts for the health and economic impact, and considers equity concerns.
  2. Further the evaluation of the economic burden of diseases using health administrative data by addressing the unique challenges of infectious diseases.
  3. Expand the use of data-driven simulation as a tool to assess complex interventions and enable a systems approach to economic evaluation, drawing from multiple disciplines.

The selected disease areas include the most burdensome pathogens in Ontario and globally, and pathogens important in the One Health context. They are public health priorities with the potential for rapid deployment of evidence into policy and practice, are uniquely suitable to address methodological challenges, and serve as the foundation for the development of a framework for economic evaluations of infectious disease interventions at the population level.

For a list of Dr. Sander's publications, please visit PubMed or Scopus.


Professor (status-only), Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
Adjunct Scientist, ICES
Scientist, Public Health Ontario
Associate, Canadian Centre for Health Economics
Canada Research Chair in Economics of Infectious Diseases (Tier 2)