Our people

Meet the academics and researchers who are passionate about embedded healthcare research.

Photo of Circular Economy in Business co-chair Kenneth Husted

Dr Valery Pavlov, Principal Lead

  • Senior Lecturer in the Information Systems and Operations Management Department, University of Auckland.
  • PhD in Business Administration and Operations Research from the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Read Valery's profile

Relevant healthcare expertise:

  • Dynamic Simulation Modeling, Process Improvement
  • Worked with Auckland, Middlemore, and Waikato hospitals in New Zealand, ACI NSW in Australia.
  • Participated in 10+ healthcare projects such as Effectiveness of Critical Care Outreach Teams, General Medicine Team Rostering, Capacity Planning of Colonoscopy Services, Managing Emergency Department Presentation Surges, Mitigating the Domino Effect of Liver Transplant Surgeries, Geriatric Patient Pathways, and Spinal Cord Injury Patient Pathways.
  • Supervised several masters and PhD students who worked on healthcare problems jointly with healthcare providers.
Abtin Ijadi Maghsoodi

Mr Abtin Ijadi Maghsoodi, Co-Lead

Abtin Ijadi Maghsoodi is the Lead Data Scientist for Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand Te Manawa Taki (Midlands Region), Waikato District. Abtin is in charge of all things predictive and prescriptive analytics including projects around big data decision support systems, predictive and prescriptive modelling, and optimization. Abtin is involved in various clinical and non-clinical projects on district, regional and national levels developing and creating solutions for clinicians, senior health professionals, and executives.

Abtin is also a PhD candidate in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Auckland Business School. His PhD research project, Improving Effectiveness and Efficiency of Acute Older Patients’ Journey, seeks to develop and apply predictive models along with pathway modelling to improve the quality of care and design a more efficient pathway process of care for acute geriatric patients. Furthermore, Abtin is a visiting researcher at the Sinbad² research lab (Sistemas Inteligentes Basados en Análisis de Decisión Difusos – in English: Intelligent Systems Based on Fuzzy Decision Analysis) at the University of Jaen, Spain. His areas of expertise and interests include data-driven decision-making, machine learning, decision analysis, large scale decision support systems, healthcare analytics, blockchain in healthcare, and optimization modelling. 

Hassan Assareh

Dr Hassan Assareh

  • Statistical and Simulation Modelling Manager at Agency for Clinical Innovation – NSW Ministry of Health, Australia.
  • PhD in Statistics from Queensland University of Technology.

Relevant healthcare expertise

  • Biostatistics, health service research, dynamic simulation modelling
  • Worked 10+ years in Australian health sectors at local and state-wide levels in New South Wales.
  • Participated in 50+ healthcare studies and projects including evaluation of state-wide interventions such as Between the Flags (management of deteriorating patients), Leading Better Value Care initiatives, Sepsis Kills, falls prevention, venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention, Frailty screening, Palliative care enhancement, and Spinal Cord Injury model of care.
  • Published 100+ peer-reviewed journal and conference abstracts in areas of statistics, medical informatics, health service research, care quality, and public health.
  • Co-supervised 6 masters and PhD students who worked on healthcare problems.
Ansari Jainullabudeen

Ansari Jainullabudeen, Co-Lead

Ansari Jainullabudeen is a health economist and evaluation professional who has worked in healthcare sector for over two decades. His educational qualifications are in Computer Science (B.Sc) and Economics (B.Sc and Masters). His focus is in the value of healthcare reforms or new investments and in particularly robustness in the modelling of complex realities of care delivery and patient journey and heterogenous characteristics of target patient cohorts.

He is currently a Senior Analyst in the Economics Advisory unit within NSW Health Infrastructure which oversees health capital projects in the NSW state. Through his current and previous health economics and evaluation roles in NSW Ministry of Health and NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation, he has led on developing Business Cases, upfront Economic Appraisals and Monitoring and Evaluation, that help inform executive decisions, for state-wide treatment programs/services and development of health infrastructure. Previous to this he was a health economics researcher in UNSW where his focus was on cost effectiveness of community prevention programs and treatments.

Paul Rouse

Professor Paul Rouse

Paul Rouse is Professor of Management Accounting at the University of Auckland. His research areas include performance and productivity measurement (with a focus on Data Envelopment Analysis), revenue and cost management, cost-benefit and evaluation methods. Application areas include health, banking, and highway and aircraft maintenance. He is a member of CAANZ and the Operations Research Society of New Zealand. He has supervised 15 PhD students to date all in health.

Image of Sam Madanian

Dr Samaneh (Sam) Madanian

Dr Samaneh (Sam) Madanian, is a senior lecturer at AUT, a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH) and an educational representative at the New Zealand IoT Alliance. She is a digital health expert with a multi-disciplinary background. With extensive industry and academic experience, Dr Madanian possesses a unique combination of practical and theoretical knowledge of technologies and their applications in complex environments, particularly in healthcare.

Dr Madanian's main research interest is digital health for the development of innovative and practical solutions aimed at enhancing health equity and improving people's quality of life. Her focus on e-health technologies and applications, particularly in IoT and data science approaches, has led to numerous advances in the field. In addition to her research in mainstream healthcare, Dr Madanian's research also extends to disaster situations and pandemics.

Associate Professor Lincoln C. Wood

Associate Professor Lincoln C. Wood leverages systems thinking in performance enhancement and decision making within complex systems. Specializing in logistics and healthcare, his use of data analysis techniques, such as fuzzy DEMATEL, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), system dynamics, and machine learning, allows for improved operations and patient outcomes.