Events
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Daniel Ollendorf, PhD, MPH
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2026-10-22 10:00:00
2026-10-22 11:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Daniel Ollendorf, PhD, MPH
Topic: "At the Intersection of Access and Affordability: A Brief, Tortured History of Health Technology Assessment and the Current Role of ICER.”
Co-sponsored with the Leanord Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition
Dr. Ollendorf will describe the evolution of health technology assessment as a discipline, its interaction with US health policy, and the current role of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review as a private-sector research organization trying to bring relevant conversations on access, pricing, and ethics back into the mainstream.
Dan Ollendorf is ICER’s Chief Scientific Officer and Director of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Methods and Engagement, with responsibility for managing the organization’s internal health economics capacity and program of external collaboration, as well as collaboration with international HTA bodies and other stakeholders on key process and methods topics.
From 2007-2018, Dr. Ollendorf was Chief Scientific Officer for ICER, where he oversaw the broader HTA process and managed relationships with multiple stakeholders and research collaborators. From 2018-2023, Dr. Ollendorf served as the Director of Value Measurement & Global Health Initiatives at the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at Tufts Medical Center, where he focused on value assessment methods, drug pricing policy, and building international capacity for and interest in HTA. In addition to his current role at ICER, Dr. Ollendorf maintains a faculty appointment at CEVR and continues to teach in the Center’s graduate certificate program as well as participate in ongoing research.
Dr. Ollendorf is also a non-resident Fellow in Global Health at the Center for Global Development and serves on the Board of Directors for the ISPOR, the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research. From 2019-2024, he served as Chair of the Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) Global Policy Forum. Dr. Ollendorf received his PhD in Clinical Epidemiology from the University of Amsterdam, and an MPH in Health Policy & Management/Epidemiology from Boston University.
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Penn Medical Ethics
Silverman 240B, Penn Carey Law School, 3501 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA
The Unfinished Business of Reforming the FDA’s Accelerated Approval Pathway
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2026-10-22 16:30:00
2026-10-22 18:00:00
America/New_York
The Unfinished Business of Reforming the FDA’s Accelerated Approval Pathway
A Conversation with Stacie Dusetzina, PhD, Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBE, and Dan Ollendorf, PhD, MPH.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
Register here.
The FDA’s accelerated approval pathway allows the agency to approve drugs for serious diseases with unmet treatment need based on predicted clinical benefit, which must be confirmed through postmarket studies. Accelerated approval’s tradeoffs between speed and certainty have received substantial attention, especially challenges associated with the rigor and completion of confirmatory studies. In the wake of the FDA’s controversial accelerated approval of a drug for Alzheimer’s disease, in 2021, Congress enacted several reforms, while the FDA offered additional guidance on the pathway and several reforms of its own. Where does accelerated approval stand today and what reforms are still needed? In this panel discussion, experts in medicine, economics, law, and ethics will discuss access, quality, cost, and other issues facing accelerated approval.
Silverman 240B, Penn Carey Law School, 3501 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA
Penn Medical Ethics
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources" - Ole F. Norheim, MD
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2026-10-27 12:00:00
2026-10-27 13:00:00
America/New_York
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources" - Ole F. Norheim, MD
Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources
Ole F. Norheim, MD
Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Ethics and Population Health
Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Health systems everywhere face the same hard question: how should limited resources be allocated when needs exceed budgets? In this talk, Professor Ole F. Norheim examines the ethical foundations of priority setting in health care and the practical tools available to decision makers. Drawing on decades of work in global health and in Norway, he explores how evidence and economic analysis can inform efficient, fair and transparent priority setting.
Norheim argues that efficiency alone is insufficient. Ethical principles, including giving priority to the worse off and reducing unjust health inequalities, must be embedded in policy frameworks. He discusses how severity of illness, lifetime health prospects, and distributive justice can be operationalized alongside cost-effectiveness thresholds to guide real-world decisions.
Streaming available via Zoom.
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Medical Ethics
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 6-031 (Hybrid)
Research Ethics & Policy Series (REPS): Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas / Kiran Musunuru
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2026-11-10 12:00:00
2026-11-10 13:00:00
America/New_York
Research Ethics & Policy Series (REPS): Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas / Kiran Musunuru
Individualized Genetic Interventions
Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Pediatrics (Human Genetics)
Director, Gene Therapy for Inherited Metabolic Disorders Frontier Program
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, MPH, ML, MRA
Barry J. Gertz Professor for Translational Research
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
co-director, penn medicine/chop orphan disease center
scientific director, center for cardiovascular disease
Individualized genetic interventions are creating new possibilities for treating patients with rare and ultra-rare genetic diseases, including conditions for which conventional drug development is neither feasible nor economically viable. Advances in gene editing and other programmable genetic technologies increasingly allow therapies to be designed for individual patients based on their specific pathogenic variants. Yet the promise of these approaches raises thorny ethical questions.
How should risks and potential benefits be assessed when clinical experience is limited or nonexistent? What constitutes adequate evidence of safety and efficacy for a treatment designed for a single patient? How should informed consent address uncertainty and the potential for therapeutic misconception? And how should responsibilities for manufacturing, oversight, long-term monitoring, and equitable access be allocated among investigators, clinicians, institutions, regulators, and families? In this seminar, we will explore these questions through the emerging practice of individualized genetic medicine, examining how traditional research ethics frameworks may need to evolve while preserving meaningful protections for patients.
Registration required; Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 6-031 (Hybrid)
Penn Medical Ethics
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Jisung Park, PhD, MSc
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2026-11-12 10:00:00
2026-11-12 11:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Jisung Park, PhD, MSc
"Local Labor Market Conditions and Adaptation to Climate Change: The Role of Workers' Outside Options."
Extreme heat is a growing occupational health hazard, yet little is known about what determines whether workplaces adapt to it. Using administrative data on 15 million workers' compensation injury claims and measures of workers' outside options in more than 17,000 local occupational labor markets, this talk shows that a day above 90°F raises workplace injuries by 9 percent, and that plausibly exogenous improvements in workers' outside option wages substantially reduce this effect: a one standard deviation increase in outside option wages lowers the heat-injury relationship by 46 to 64 percent, including in many indoor settings. The findings suggest that local labor market conditions shape how well workers are protected from environmental health risks, and who bears the costs of adaptation.
Dr. R. Jisung Park is an environmental and labor economist interested broadly in how environmental factors shape economic opportunity. Prior to joining Penn, he was a member of the faculty at UCLA, and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. Dr. Park’s research combines data, quasi-experimental methods, and economic analysis to better understand the implications of environmental change for human flourishing, and how effective policy responses may be designed. For instance, his work on heat and learning uses data from millions of test scores to understand how the physical environment in which learning occurs may affect educational achievement gaps, how climate change may influence economic inequality, and what this might imply for public policy regarding climate mitigation and adaptation. Ongoing work examines such topics as the effects of extreme heat on workers and labor market inequality, the consequences of natural disasters for human capital, and the process by which workers and firms adapt to a changing environment. Dr. Park received a PhD in economics from Harvard University, where he was an NSF Fellow, and master’s degrees in Environmental Change and Management (MSc) and Development Economics (MSc) from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, Nature Human Behavior, Nature Energy, and the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and is widely cited in such media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and NPR. Dr. Park has also advised policymakers and practitioners including in the form of Congressional Testimony for the U.S. House of Representatives, and briefings for the United Nations, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, the California State Legislature, the United Kingdom Department for International Development, United Technologies, UBS, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Penn Medical Ethics
To be added to MEHP's events listserv, please contact lisa.bailey@pennmedicine.upenn.edu.