Erika Linnander, MPH, MBA

Erika Linnander directs Yale's Global Health Leadership Initiative, where she develops and leads education and research in health management across country settings. A lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, Ms. Linnander teaches management, quality improvement, and strategic problem solving across Yale’s certificate and master’s-level education programs. Over the past decade, she has designed, led, and evaluated health management programming in China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, and South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In the US, her research and practice has focused on the creation of effective organizational culture in healthcare (she recently led the design and development the successful “Leadership Saves Lives” intervention to promote organizational culture change in US hospitals). Globally, she has focused on the development of national management and governance systems as leverage points for improving health system performance and population health outcomes. She has supported a number of novel, large-scale mentorship and education programs in health and hospital management, the development of hospital and district-level governing boards, the creation of national quality improvement collaboratives in resource limited settings, and the establishment of national tools and systems to measure and improve hospital and primary care system performance. She currently serves as the principal investigator for Primary Healthcare Transformation Initiative, a multi-year effort to create a culture of performance management and accountability in Ethiopia's district health offices, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She also serves as the principal investigator of the Expanded Program on Immunization Leadership and Management Programme (EPI LAMP), a Gavi-funded effort to build leadership and management capacity among teams of senior managers and Ministry officials with responsibility for immunization program performance from across Africa and Asia.

Ms. Linnander also uses innovative implementation science research methods to evaluate prospective interventions to improve health and health equity in and across complex systems within and across country settings. She currently serves as the principal investigator for the USAID-funded mixed-methods evaluation of Project Last Mile (PLM), a multi-country effort to translate the supply chain and logistics expertise of the Coca-Cola system to public sector medical supply chain organizations across Africa.

In addition to her academic expertise and practical experience in global health management, she possesses significant operational experience in hospital settings. Prior to joining the Yale team, she worked in hospital administration at the Johns Hopkins Health System. Ms. Linnander received her MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her MBA from the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business.