Dr. Nandakumar is a Professor of the Practice at Brandeis University where he is the Director of the PhD Program at the Heller School and Directs the Institute for Global Health and Development. He also serves as the first Chief Economist for Global Health at the United States Agency for International Development. An internationally recognized expert in health care financing he has over 25 years of technical and managerial experience in health care financing in the US and other developing countries with a specific focus on long-term care financing, aging and its impact on health systems in developing countries, National Health Accounts, and other health care financing issues. His recent research has focused on fungibility of donor assistance; understanding the linkages between health expenditures and maternal and infant mortality and studying the relationship between growth in a country’s income and spending on health. He has helped design and conduct Household Health Care Utilization and Expenditure surveys in numerous countries. He also has conducted studies to assess the costs and efficiency of hospital and primary health care services. Dr. Nandakumar is extremely interested in developing methods to track resource flows to understand the efficiency of health spending. He has assisted with an innovative approach to track health spending on Maternal and Child Health, Family Planning and Infection Control in Egypt