1. Tell us something we don’t know. (Anything!)
During my graduate studies, I visited UCSD for several months and then UChicago for several months. To get from San Diego to Chicago I drove the 4,000 miles by myself in a tiny rental car – a good way to clear your head in the middle of a PhD.
2. Which fiction book would you recommend to researchers and innovators in healthcare, and why?
I recently finished the Rosie Project Triology – an interesting perspective on living on the autism spectrum and how people with the same diagnosis are still very different.
3. What are you working on right now that you’re excited about?
Currently, I am writing up results from a large RCT we ran in South Africa on medical adherence of pregnant women. We are investigating how we can design better reminders.
4. Who’s doing something that you admire in healthcare today, and why is it so cool?
I am a huge fan of Dr. Michael Greger and his website nutritionfacts.org as well as his books “How not to die” and “How to survive a pandemic.” Science communication at its best!
5. What’s the biggest barrier to getting things done in your line of work?
For most of my projects I need collaborators to run field experiments with. Unfortunately, it is still a long and quite difficult process to align interests. But when it does work out, it creates some fantastic insights.
6. Imagine you win an award for impacting healthcare. What did you do?
It is important to me to promote evidence-based decision making and understanding at which stage different policy instruments are the right tool to use: nudges, incentives, or regulation.
7. What advice would you give innovators in healthcare?
Try to think of ways or technologies to impact behavior that do not require people to be motivated or attentive. Attention is such a scarce good and motivation is always temporary. Less communication and more re-design of basic decision-making environments make it easy for people to do the right thing without needing to think about it.
More about Dr. Christina Gravert:
Dr. Christina Gravert is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. She is also the Co-Founder of Impactually, a behavioral science management consultancy. As a behavioral economist, Christina studies how people make decisions and how they can be motivated or nudged to “do the right thing.” She aspires to increase the welfare of individuals and society through behavioral insights and evidence-based decision making. She mostly works on the topics of environmental sustainability, health and charitable giving.
Christina has trained hundreds of executives in behavioral science methods through workshops and keynotes and her online course Designing Nudges. She has collaborated with, among others, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Health Agency, Unemployment Agency, Food Agency, ICA Supermarkets, and many other public and private actors.
She received her undergraduate degree in economics from the Technical University of Berlin and her Ph.D. from Aarhus University, Denmark.
