Jinhu is a Senior Research Fellow in the ​Department of Health Economics, Wellbeing and Society, and the National Centre for Health Workforce Studies at the Australian National University. Previously she worked as a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. ​From 2017 to 2023 she was an Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow. She obtained her PhD in economics from McMaster University in Canada.

Her research fields of interest are health economics, economics of education, and development economics. Her main research areas include social determinants of health and human capital and the economics of the health workforce. Her expertise lies in using causal inference methods and  Discrete Choice Experiments to address important empirical issues in health, education and development. She has published in leading academic journals in her fields, including the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Health Economics, and Social Science and Medicine. She has attracted over $4.2 million of research funding, with $3.8 million awarded from Category 1 national competitive grant schemes from the ARC and the Medical Research Future Funds (MRFF). She is the leading Chief Investigator for an ARC DECRA project and an ARC Discovery Project, and a key Chief Investigator for an MRFF Primary Health Care Research grant.

She has worked on projects investigating the causal effect of parental education on offspring health, cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, the effects of early-life shocks and public investments on later-life health and human capital outcomes, the effects of incentives and market structure in the health care markets on the behaviours of healthcare providers, and the effects of physician behaviours and models of care on population health outcomes. Her current projects examine the impacts of counter-COVID public policies such as school closures on child development, and the optimal workforce mix for team-based care in managing chronic diseases. 

More information is provided on her personal website: http://www.jinhu-li.com/

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