María Kathia Cárdenas

María Kathia joined the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) as a DPhil student in 2023. Her DPhil research aims to estimate the economic burden and health-related quality of life of people with dementia and their carers and to assess the cost and cost-effectiveness of implementing a national diagnostic system for dementia in Peru. Her DPhil research is part of the IMPACT (Innovations using mHealth for people with dementia and co-morbidities) project, funded by the NIHR Global Health Policy and Systems Research. In this project, Maria Kathia is the Peruvian co-lead for the health economics work package. Her DPhil is supervised by Dr Filipa Landeiro (HERC), Professor José Leal (HERC), and Dr Christopher Butler (Imperial College London). 

She has previously worked as a researcher at the CRONICAS Centre of Excellence in Chronic Diseases at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Lima, Peru), coordinating the health system assessments of the first phase of the COHESION (COmmunity HEalth System InnovatiON) project in Peru, Nepal, and Mozambique, in collaboration with the University of Geneva and other institutions. She is now a member of the External Advisory Board of the second phase of the COHESION-I Project, funded by the NIHR. Maria Kathia holds an MSc in Health Economics (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and a BSc in Economics (Universidad del Pacífico).