Bio

Christa Altenstetter, an expert in comparative public policy, health policy, and policy-making in the European Union (EU), has devoted most of her research over the last twenty years to health care reform from a comparative perspective, the impact of EU developments on the member states in the field of health, and international and cross-national regulation in health care. She holds a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University, directed a research project at the School of Public Health at Yale University, served on the research staff of several American and European Research Institutes, and has frequently worked as a consultant to health authorities and the World Health Organization. Altenstetter is the author of Medical Technology in Japan: The Politics of Regulation (2014),  Medical Devices: European Union Policymaking and the Implementation of Patient Health and Safety in France (2008), and editor or coeditor of Innovation in Health Policy and Service Delivery (1981), Comparative Health Policy and the New Right: From Rhetoric to Reality (1991), Health Policy Reform, National Variations and Globalization (1997), and Health Policy (1998). She published several articles on a cross-national project: “Bridging International and National Regulatory Policymaking on Medical Devices: A Comparison of the European Union, Japan, and the United States.” An active member of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), she founded and directed an IPSA research committee on comparative health policy, which established a research link to the major international and national health databases and websites.