Franco Sassi holds a Chair in International Health Policy and Economics and is the Director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation. His work has been aimed at assessing the impacts of public policies to tackle major chronic diseases and their predisposing risk factors, including poor nutrition, physical inactivity, alcohol and tobacco use, and a range of environmental and social exposures. He is the author and editor of a large number of publications on economic aspects of public health, including the books “Obesity and the economics of prevention: Fit not fat”, in 2010, "Tackling harmful alcohol use: Economics and public health policy" in 2015, and "Health Taxes: Policy and Practice" in 2022. Prior to joining Imperial College, Franco was a Senior Health Economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -OECD, Paris - where he developed and was responsible for the Organisation´s Public Health Programme. And before that he was a senior lecturer in health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and director of the graduate programme in Health Policy, Planning and Financing.
Franco obtained his doctorate in health economics from the University of London. He held an adjunct professor position at the Université de Montréal, as well as visiting positions at a number of universities in the United States, including University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, University of California at San Francisco, and Duke University, and at the Catholic University of Rome. He was awarded a 2000-01 Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy by the Commonwealth Fund.