Keynote Speakers

When: Wednesday, 7 October 2026, 9.30 - 10.30 

Where: Institute for African Studes, Conference hall 

Aldo Faisal is Principal investigator of the borderless Brain and Behaviour Lab that works at the Interface of Machine Learning, Neuroscience & Biomedical Engineering. Aldo is professor and head of the Chair in Digital Health & Data Science applied to the Life Sciences at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). He also holds a professorship in AI & Neuroscience at the Imperial College London. Aldo is also director of Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute (London), Associate Investigator at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and its affiliated faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit (University College London).

Agentic AI for Holistic Health 

This keynote traces the intellectual arc from the birth of data-driven medicine to today's health foundation models. It begins with John Snow, who linked cholera cases to a single water pump and turned that observation into an intervention. It ends with Nightingale AI, the health foundation model we are developing. 

The core logic has not changed: infer from data what to do. What has changed is its reach, from statistics and causal reasoning to large-scale, multimodal machine learning.

Modern systems move beyond static prediction towards continuous patient modelling. They combine health records, imaging, biosignals and behaviour into one representation of a person's health over time. Foundation models, AI agents and reinforcement learning make this holistic view usable in care. They also meet institutions built for single-purpose products: we still regulate healthcare AI like a wheelchair, one device and one declared purpose at a time. For health economists this raises concrete questions about evidence generation, HTA and reimbursement when one model serves many clinical uses. The talk presents modern AI as a natural extension of data-driven reasoning and shows where fundamentally new methodological and conceptual challenges begin.

© Thor Balkheld

When: Friday, 9 October 2026, 9.30-10.30 

Where: Faculty of Law and Economics, H24

Gustav Tinghög is a Professor of Economics at Linköping University, Sweden, where he earned his PhD in health economics in 2011. His doctoral research explored the economics and ethics of healthcare rationing. His current research examines how intuition, reflection and emotion shape human decision-making, both at the individual and societal level. As part of the JEDI Lab (Judgement, Emotion, Decision and Intuition), he uses experimental approaches to investigate cooperation, risk-taking, moral judgments and choices between immediate and future benefits. His work connects economics with psychology and ethics to understand how people make difficult decisions and how these insights can inform public policy. Alongside his research, he teaches behavioural economics, health economics and ethics, and microeconomic analysis.

Why People Hate Health Economics - Three Psychological Explanations and the Case for Health Economics 

Priority-setting decisions based on health maximisation routinely conflict with the views of the general public. We argue that health economics has been largely oblivious to the role of emotions in decision making, and that this has limited its usefulness as an input to health policy. This paper presents a psychological account of why the outputs of health economic evaluations are unlikely to be compatible with public views. Three systematic phenomena — taboo trade-offs, compassion fade, and cost neglect — bias judgements about health-care priority setting, underpinned by a broader disconnect between how people reason about identifiable individuals and how they reason about aggregated groups. A health economics that ignores these mechanisms will continue to produce analyses that are technically correct and politically unusable. The constructive response is not to eliminate emotion from decision making, but to sequence analysis before it. Cost-effectiveness analysis, on this view, is not a decision rule but decision hygiene — a structured way of making visible the costs and foregone alternatives that the mind routinely fails to represent, so that emotional judgement operates on a more nearly complete picture of the decision. The wider implication is a reorientation of the field — what we call Health Emonomics — that treats affective engagement as constitutive of medical decision making rather than as an obstacle to it.