Affiliates | Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products

	Dr Julie Berthet Valdois UN’s International Office of Migration Julie was previously a part-time Research Officer at REEP for the Knowledge Hub on Tobacco Taxation and Illicit Trade between 2017 and 2019. She subsequently worked at the WHO’s Fiscal Policy for Health Unit, as technical officer for the reporting and knowledge management team at the WHO FCTC Secretariat in Geneva. Julie currently works at the UN’s International Office of Migration in Dakar. Previously, she spent 8+ years working in the area of Monitoring and Evaluation for education and health projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her expertise includes: strategic planning, project management, monitoring and evaluation systems, large-scale impact evaluations, training workshop, data analysis and results dissemination.
	Dr Evan Blecher Global Tax Programme at the World Bank Evan was instrumental in setting up the ETCP in 2011. He is an economist and has worked in the Fiscal Policies for Health unit at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for coordination of health taxes, including alcohol, sugar sweetened beverages and tobacco. Prior to WHO, he was a senior economist in the Health Policy Center of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also is an honorary associate professor in the University of Cape Town’s, School of Economics. He has also worked as a senior economist in the American Cancer Society's Health and Economic Policy Research Program and was an affiliate in UCT's Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, where he served as the project director for the Economics of Tobacco Control Project.
	Dr Grieve Chelwa The Africa Institute Grieve is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at The Africa Institute in the UAE. Prior, he was a Senior Lecturer at the Graduate School of Business. He holds a PhD in economics at the University of Cape Town, where he focused on the economics of tobacco control in South Africa, Uganda and Zambia. Grieve also worked as a researcher at the Center for Financial Regulation and Inclusion in Cape Town, where he worked on public policy issues in the Southern African region. His areas of expertise include: Economics of tobacco control; health economics; development economics; econometrics; and impact evaluations.
	Dr Alfred Mukong University of Namibia Alfred is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Namibia. Alfred joined the Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP), now the Research unit on the Economics of Excisable Products (REEP) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2015. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cape Town. His current research focuses on the economics of tobacco control, health and environmental economics. Within the field of economics of tobacco control, his research focuses peer networks and cigarette smoking; price elasticity of demand for cigarettes; evaluation of the effectiveness of various tobacco policy interventions including tobacco excise tax; the impact of alcohol/tobacco spending on household resource allocation and smoking/alcohol-related inequalities in health.
	Retselisitsoe Pokothoane University of Cape Town Pokothoane is a Mosotho Economics PhD student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a research affiliate at REEP. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics, where he was a Canon Collins Scholar and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics (National University of Lesotho [NUL], 2019), where he received top student prize from Lesotho’s Central Bank. His PhD thesis estimates cigarette demand using novel approaches, and examines the distributional effects of cigarette excise tax increases across socioeconomic groups in Lesotho. He also works part-time on Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) and Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA) projects. Before his PhD studies, he was a research assistant at REEP under the Minimum Unit Price (MUP) policy on alcohol project and a lecturer at Botho University and NUL.
	Dr Laura Rossouw Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE2RO) Laura is currently a senior researcher at Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE2RO). Prior, she was a Senior Lecturer, specialising in health economics at Wits University. She was previously a senior research officer in the ETCP/REEP between August 2017 and January 2020, and the project manager of the Knowledge Hub. She holds a PhD in Economics from Stellenbosch University (SU), South Africa. Prior to joining the ETCP, Laura worked at Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) based at the Economics Department of SU. The group focuses on issues of poverty, income distribution, social mobility, economic development and social policy. Laura's research interests include the economics of tobacco control, economic evaluations of health interventions, the economic impact of tobacco and alcohol use, demand-side factors related to health, and maternal, infant and child health.
	Michal Stoklosa WHO’s Fiscal Policy for Health Unit Michal is an Economist with the Fiscal Policies for Health at the World Health Organization. He completed his PhD at UCT in 2019, focusing on tobacco product substitution. He has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and co-authored health policy reports and book chapters, including The Tobacco Atlas. Michal received a MA in managerial economics from University of Warsaw, and a MA in economics from Georgia State University. He is a co-supervisor of Sam Filby’s PhD thesis.
	Jean Tesche USA Jean is a consultant on tobacco control matters for several institutions. She has a PhD in Economics (CGE models, Comparative Econ Systems) from Columbia Business School at Columbia University. She has considerable experience in tax policy, administration, and modelling: particularly tobacco tax modelling. She has taught economics in the US, Hungary and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and worked with US Treasury’s Office of Technical Assistance, the World Bank and the World Health Organization, mostly in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Africa. Jean was a visiting researcher at the University of Cape Town from Feb. 2019 - Aug. 2020, joining the Knowledge Hub on Tobacco Taxation and Illicit Trade as a special consultant.
	Dr Ernest Tingum University of Namibia Ernest was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ETCP for three years. Since 2020 he has been a senior lecturer at the University of Namibia. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Dar es Salaam. During his PhD, he was a researcher with the “Tobacco Control Analysis and Intervention Evaluation in China and Tanzania” team at the Department of Economics. From 2012 to 2015, he was the Lead Specialist for WageIndicator Foundation in Amsterdam and between 2015 and 2016, he was a research fellow at the School of Public Policy, Central European University (CEU), Hungary. He has also worked as an independent consultant with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on issues of youth and women employment in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. His current research focuses on tobacco taxation and its interface with industry reactions and responses, effectiveness of tobacco control policies, illicit trade of tobacco products, labour market issues and collective bargaining in the African labour market.