Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ	A.B.	06/1968	Public and International Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI	Ph.D,	06/1976	Political Science

Thomas J.Bossert, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer. Emeritus in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Until 2022 he was the Director of the International Health Systems Program (IHSP) that sponsored many research projects and executive training courses. He has many years of experience in international health in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. His specialties include health reform, decentralization, sustainability and implementation science, social capital, policy analysis, organizational and institutional analysis, human resources policy, public/private relations, community development and project design and evaluation. His publications have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Health Policy and Planning, WHO Bulletin, The Lancet among other journals and monographs. His pioneering work on sustainability of donor funded projects was published in Social Science and Medicine in 1990. His innovative “decision space” approach to decentralization has appeared in many peer reviewed journals and recently in an edited book on decentralization. He led a WHO project to develop a rapid assessment tool for strategic planning for human resources for heath that produced a guide published by WHO. His responsibilities have included providing technical assistance, conducting research and project management for contracts with various donors including USAID, DfID, World Bank, WHO and the Inter-American Development Bank. At Harvard, he taught courses on health system reform and political economy of health systems and was the recipient of a Teaching Citation Award based on student evaluations in 2014. He continues to teach executive training courses in the IHSP. He also teaches in the Harvard/World Bank Flagship Course on Health System Strengthening in Washington and in various countries around the world. Dr. Bossert earned his A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs (formerly Woodrow Wilson School) at Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is fluent in Spanish and has a working knowledge of French.