Bio

Michael Schlanders´s narrative CV including selected publications can be downloaded here:

Michael Schlander, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., is the founding Chairman and Scientific Director of the not-for-profit Institute for Innovation & Valuation in Health Care (InnoVal^HC), established in Aschaffenburg and Wiesbaden, Germany, in July 2005.

He has been a full professor (W3, Chair) of Health Economics at the University of Heidelberg, since 2017. Adhering to the so-called Jülich model, he was granted leave of absence from the University to act as the founding Head of the Division of Health Economics at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). In addition, Michael Schlander is an associate professor at the Alfred Weber Institute for Economics (AWI) of the University of Heidelberg, since July 2020.

The Division of Health Economics at the DKFZ, which had been established newly under the leadership of Otmar D. Wiestler, was closed by Otmar Wiestler’s successor when Michael Schlander retired from his role in October 2025 – officially for strategic reasons, despite an «excellent» international evaluation of the Division in 2023, i.e., only five years after its inauguration.

Before joining the DKFZ in 2017, Michael Schlander served as a full professor for Health Care & Innovation Management from 2002 to 2016 at the University of Business and Society of Applied Sciences (Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Ludwigshafen)..

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he represented the DKFZ on the board of a global COVID-19 and Cancer Task Force of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) under the leadership of Professor Richard Sullivan, King’s College London. As of 2021, Professor Schlander has been appointed board member of the Health Economics Working Group of the Organization of European Cancer Institutes (OECI) under the leadership of Professor Wim van Harten, Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), Amsterdam. Under its umbrella, Michael Schlander inaugurated an international OECI Task Force on Socioeconomic Impact Research, and consensus recommendations for much-needed conceptual and methodological standards in the field were first published in The Lancet Oncology in 2024.

Prior to returning to academia in 2002, he had spent 15 years in executive roles (as Managing Director / CEO; Director of a Strategic Business Unit; Head of Clinical I Euro Development) in the international biopharmaceutical industry with offices in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. The management of the turn-around of a medium-sized German pharmaceutical enterprise, the international launches of pantoprazole (a proton pump inhibitor for acid-related gastrointestinal disorders), as well as the strategic development of a global Cancer Business Plan for one of the top-ten biopharmaceutical companies, and the successful European clinical development of new molecules, rank high among the accomplishments during his 15 years in industry.

Further to this, he helped co-found the German Society for Health Economics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie, DGGOe) in 2008, and in 2012, he acted as the Scientific Chair for the European Congress of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) in Berlin, which had more than 3,500 attendants. He is a member of numerous international scientific associations, including Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi), the International Health Economics Association (IHEA), and the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). In addition to his extensive engagement on peer review boards for a number of medical and economic journals, he is currently serving on the editorial boards of the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Health Services (with a focus on the sections on Cost and Resource Allocation) and the German language journal for medical ethics (Zeitschrift für medizinische Ethik, ZfmE).

In 2005, he established a Health Economics Summer School, which took place in Heidelberg from 2006 through 2023. Formally under the auspices of the University, the Summer School was later organized by the DKFZ Division of Health Economics in 2019. After an interruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event resumed in February 2023 with a Winter School taking place as previously at the Studio Villa Bosch in Heidelberg.

Following the closure of the venue at Villa Bosch and the strategic decision by the DKFZ management board to discontinue its engagement in health economics, the Heidelberg Health Economics Summer Schools have been taken back to the Institute of Innovation & Valuation in Health Care, and have been moved to new venues in Bruneck in South Tyrol in the Italian dolomites (Brunico, Alto Adige, Italia, as of 2024) and in Wiesbaden (as of 2026).

As to his academic background, Michael Schlander studied medicine and psychology at the University of Frankfurt, and he has been licensed as a physician in Germany since 1985. He received his M.D. (summa cum laude) from the University of Frankfurt, his Master of Business Administration (M.B.A., as valedictorian of the class of 1994) from City University of Seattle, Washington, a diploma in health economics from the Stockholm School of Economics (2002), and the venia legendi for health economics from the University of Heidelberg (2007). Michael Schlander is the recipient of the «Best Contributed Poster Presentation Award» (out of 750 presentations at the 8th Annual European ISPOR Congress in Florence, Italy, in November 2005) and the «ISPOR Distinguished Service Award» for serving as Scientific Program Chair at the 15th Annual European ISPOR Congress in Berlin, Germany, in November 2012. In 2023, he received the Best General Poster Research Presentation Award (out of ~2500 presentations) with Ramon Schaefer [first author] at the Annual European ISPOR Congress, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 2023, who presented their study on the «value of a statistical life year».