Sachiko Ozawa

Sachiko (Sachi) Ozawa is an Associate Professor at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Maternal and Child Health at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She is a health economist whose work focuses on generating evidence to improve access to vaccines and quality-assured medicines. She is interested in the interface between pharmacy and public health, conducting research on the value of vaccines, the economic impact of substandard and falsified medicines, and online pharmacy. Her research on the return on investment from childhood immunizations have been used by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization (WHO) and Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance) to advocate for vaccinations in low- and middle-income countries. For example, her work have been tweeted by Bill Gates, was instrumental in securing the funding replenishment for Gavi of $7.5 billion for 2016-2020, and contributed to Addis declaration at the Ministerial Conference on Immunization in Africa. She recently conducted a meta-analysis on the prevalence of substandard and falsified medicines, finding that 13.6% of essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries are of poor quality. She has been developing models to estimate the economic impact of substandard and falsified antimalarials and antibiotics in developing countries.