dr. Ângela Jornada Ben, MD

Ângela Jornada Ben graduated in Medicine in 2005 at the University of Passo Fundo, Brazil. Shortly after her graduation, she worked as a medical doctor in a small Brazilian countryside town for a year. In 2007, she started her medical residency in Family Medicine at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre where she completed her training in 2011. Also in 2011, she earned her master’s degree in Epidemiology from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) after studying the reliability and performance of questionnaires used to evaluate adherence to hypertensive treatment. In 2011, she started as a faculty at the Department of Collective Health of the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) where she worked until 2016 supervising health sciences students and teaching epidemiology, family medicine, and public health. She also used to share her time working as a Family Doctor at the Brazilian Public Health System (SUS) and at the Telemedicine Government Program (TelessaúdeRS) supporting clinical decision-making by medical doctors working at SUS. Since August 2016, she lives with her partner in the Netherlands. In the meantime, she worked on her Ph.D. thesis, which she successfully defended in 2017 at the UFRGS Postgraduate Program in Epidemiology, Brazil. The focus of her thesis was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of implementing Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Strategies in the SUS. To further develop her knowledge and skills in Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment, she went for a second Ph.D. in the Department of Health Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In February 2023 she successfully defended her thesis entitled “Health-Related Quality of Life and Statistical Challenges in Trial-Based Economic Evaluations”. She worked as a research fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health & Development (AIGHD) to investigate the economic and health burden of Long COVID in Kenya and as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Health Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to investigate statistical methods for economic evaluations based on real-world data. She is currently a visiting fellow at VU and working as a scientist at Services in Health Economics, SHE.