Board & Team

Based in Haarlem, the Netherlands and led by board members Wim Leereveld (CEO) and Ed Monchen (COO), the team is responsible for the day-to-day activities and further development of both the Access to Medicine Index and the Foundation. The team regularly organises and attends various stakeholder events to share the rationale behind the Access to Medicine Index as well as the latest Index results, and also conducts research internally to dig deeper into access to medicine issues and stay up to date on global health developments.

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Wim Leereveld
Wim Leereveld
CEO and Founder

Wim Leereveld established the Access to Medicine Foundation in 2004. Today, Wim leads the team, takes a hands-on role in the Foundation's day-to-day strategic operations and oversees the publication of the bi-annual Access to Medicine Index.

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Prior to forming the Foundation, he was co-founder of PMSI and Walsh International, leading providers of information services to the healthcare industry. Both Walsh and PMSI later went on to become listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. It was while he was working so closely with some of the most powerful names in the healthcare industry that he had the idea of creating the Access to Medicine Index.

In the knowledge that some two billion people in developing countries have no access to affordable medicines, he decided to develop a ranking that would clearly show what the major pharmaceutical companies were doing to make their medicine available to these people. The aim of the Index is to stimulate positive change by publicly encouraging pharmaceutical companies for their efforts and rewarding them for improvements. Wim is a regular speaker on this topic at conferences and other events. 

Ed Monchen
Chief Operating Officer

Ed has a background in developing strategies and  raising funding for new innovative business concepts. As an Entrepreneurial Manager, he has worked in the Netherlands and abroad for various start-up and blue chip companies (HP, Aon). 

 

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Since 2008, he is active in the field of sustainable development and co-developed People 4 Earth, a new sustainability framework. Ed studied Management Science and Industrial Engineering at the Technical University Eindhoven.

Jayasree Iyer
Head of Research

Jay is a specialist in global health and neglected tropical diseases. She leads the Research team at the Foundation and is responsible for the Index and stakeholder relations. She holds various postgraduate degrees (Masters and PhD) from Singapore and the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. 

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She has a career in malaria and neglected tropical disease research and development and in public-private partnerships strategy. She has worked for various non-government organisations, academic institutions and was part of the founding team of a diagnostic service company in the US. Jay was recently responsible for creating, negotiating and managing public private partnerships in R&D for medicines for global health.  She is an avid writer of various technical and research reports, book chapters and reviews, along with strategy papers for medicines for developing countries and solutions for neglected tropical diseases. 

Suzanne Wolf
Communications

Suzanne’s fields of expertise are communications and marketing, 15 years of both strategic and hands-on experience at internationally listed companies such as O2 and Philips, as well as in a major Dutch health-care organisation, gives her an in-depth and broad insight in how good communications work.

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Suzanne has a bachelor in Political Science and a master in Communications Science from the University of Amsterdam.

Leon Zijlmans
Chief Financial Officer

Leon is trained as a business economist from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Since 1977, he has worked in a number of different organisations as financial controller, financial manager and CFO. 

 

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He also was logistics manager for several years in an international chemical production company. Since 1999, he has been working in the organic food sector in various wholesale companies. In 2008, he entered the non-profit sector working part-time for various initiatives and foundations involved in sustainability (People4Earth), organic agriculture and human health (Louis Bolk Institute), and an organic chain organisation (Bionext).

Sara Brewer
Research

Sara’s background is in global health and development, having focused on vulnerable populations and access issues in select African, South Asian, and Eastern- and Western European countries. With an MSc in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam, 

 

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she has conducted strong, academically rigorous evaluations and reports for various development projects, and has worked in utilising innovative ICT strategies to strengthen health systems and increase access to HIV prevention and harm reduction services among vulnerable populations in Central Asia. 

During her MSc studies in Medical Anthropology, she focused on Pharmaceutical Anthropology, investigating the social lives of medicines and specifically cultural constructions related drug use and drug treatment therapy in Western Europe. An established writer, she has written internationally published reports, strategy papers for international institutions and governments, various articles, and is active in various social media outlets. She has also taught undergraduate courses in health and development, and supervised graduate students in medical anthropology. She holds a BA in International Relations from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in International Political Economy. 

Tara Prasad
Research

Tara completed her BA from McGill University with a double major in Economics and International Development Studies and a minor in Management. She earned her MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics, where she focused on Economic Development Policy and the use of econometrics to examine social and economic development trends.

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After her master's degree, Tara worked for a year at MSCI as a Research Analyst on the Access to Medicine Index 2012, engaging in the methodology revamp, data collection, analysis and ranking. She then moved to work directly at the Access to Medicine Foundation where she now works as a Lead Researcher on the Access to Medicine Index.

Delphi Coppens
Research

Delphi has a BSc in Biomedical Sciences and an MSc in Cognitive Neurosciences, where she gained knowledge covering many therapeutic areas.  After completing her research master’s degree in the biomedical field at the University of Amsterdam, she started working for the pharmaceutical companies Genzyme and MSD. 

 

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Here she worked in conducting clinical trials and medical information services. She has an additional MSc in Medical Anthropology, where she has studied cultural and social aspects related to health care. In South Africa, she has studied compulsive drug use within the local cultural and social construct. 

Alice Helbing
Projects

Alice earned a BA (Hons.) in Psychology at the University of Michigan before obtaining an MSc. in International Relations from the University of Amsterdam. She worked on several projects at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research and gained marketing and communications experience at an international law firm in Amsterdam before moving on to work as a researcher, consultant and trainer in the international public sector. 

 

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Her previous work includes consulting and developing interactive training workshops to find solutions for various government agencies, academic institutions and NGOs on issues such as counter-terrorism, government centralisation and conflict resolution. Since 2005, Alice has also been involved in several education-focused community development programmes in the United States, South Africa, Nepal and most recently Rwanda.

Lisanne Urlings
Impact Assessment

Lisanne holds a MSc (cum laude) in Global Business and Stakeholder Management and a BSc in International Business Administration, both from the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University). She has a special interest in the interlink between business and social issues and her Master's thesis focused on corporate approaches to urban poverty in developing countries. 

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Lisanne is part of the impact assessment team that researches the impact of the Access to Medicine Index. In addition to her work at the Foundation, she is a PhD candidate at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM).

Ariane van Marwijk
Project Management - Impact Assessment

Ariane is a specialist in impact assessment, stakeholder dialogue and the development of public-private partnerships. As the Foundation's project manager for impact assessment, she organises the impact assessment project. She maintains the contacts with the external evaluation team and with stakeholders, safeguards the quality of the evaluation and discusses the results with our external Impact Assessment Reference Group.

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Ariane has worked as a special advisor on public private partnerships for the Minister of Development Cooperation at the Dutch of Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As a consultant she developed international supply chain projects and raised funds for many private companies and non-governmental organisations. She studied Town and Country Planning and Policy Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.

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