Congratulations to Associate Professor Valentin Zelenyuk on being granted an ARC Future Fellowship Award. He has received funding of $944,000 for research on advancing the theory of productivity and efficiency analysis, with application to analysing productivity and efficiency of Australian hospitals, to identify the best-practices and their determinants and recommend improvements and necessary reforms. The high level of healthcare costs in Australia (about 5 percent of gross domestic product), as well as their rapid and accelerating growth, imply that application of methods developed through this project may save billions of dollars and, more importantly, thousands of lives. An expected outcome of this project will be superior theoretical and practical methods for analysing productivity and efficiency of economic systems, to enhance understanding of the potential for improvements and of the necessary reforms.
Upon learning of this news while on a research visit to the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) Valentin wrote:
“I am truly thankful and greatly honoured to receive this prestigious Future Fellow Award, from the highly respected Australian Research Council and UQ, and I would like to thank them for all their support that directly or indirectly helped in this endeavour. Indeed, this particular award, and all the achievements that led to it, are a result of the influence from many people, starting from my family and relatives, my teachers and co-authors, colleagues, editors and referees. Thanks also to the students and all the administrative staff who helped me on this interesting journey, which I am hoping and striving will continue to bring useful output for society.”
“I also would like to especially thank the academic staff who made an extraordinary contribution to my development, which was critical for this award: Rolf Färe and Shawna Grosskopf (my main PhD supervisors and mentors at Oregon State University, USA), and Leopold Simar (my supervisor and mentor during my Postdoc Fellowship at the Institute of Statistics of the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium). It is the work with them and learning from them that, to a large extent, made me who I am as a researcher. The ongoing research projects with them form the basis and essence of the research agenda for the project behind this ARC Future Fellowship.”
Associate Professor Zelenyuk continued, “I also would like to especially thank my CEPA colleagues —particularly the Advisory Board, Prasada Rao, Knox Lovell, Chris O'Donnell, Antonio Peyrache, Alicia Rambaldi, as well as Tim Coelli who was at CEPA’s origin. They created the greatest environment for productivity and efficiency analysis in the world and I am honored that I joined their efforts, trying to contribute as well. I also greatly thank the entire School for its support and for creating a great research environment with such a strong Economic Theory group, a rapidly strengthening Macroeconomics group and the emerging and very promising Applied Economics group.”
Valentin finished with, “Last, yet not least, I’d also like to send my greatest words of appreciation to all those who at various stages helped me with shaping up the application and the response to reviewers for this award, especially those who gave many valuable comments: Prasada Rao, Sara Dolnicar, Jongsay Yong (collaborator for the empirical part of the project behind this award), Victor Callan, Paul Frijters, Chris O’Donnell, Rodney Strachan, Flavio Menezes and all the UQ Research team, especially Nicole Thompson, as well as Kayleen Campbell who helped correcting my still to be improved English.”
Valentin was one of 14 new ARC Future Fellows at the University of Queensland across all fields and disciplines of research. Read about all 14 here.
