Principal Investigator
Li-Wei Chao, PI of the MSE Project, is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Porto Business School (Portugal), funded under an Advanced Grant from the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT). He is also a Senior Fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and Research Affiliate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). He formerly was an appointed expert in Health Economics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia and of Healthcare Systems at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), a Visiting Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and an Honorary Research Associate at the Human Sciences Research Council (South Africa). Using his medical background and economics training, his current research focuses on topics related to health and economics. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of a project funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that examines entrepreneurship in townships in South Africa, the effect of poor health and HIV/AIDS on entrepreneurial entry, exit, and success, and the extent to which HIV-related stigma differentially harms specific business sectors. He is also the PI of a project that uses behavioral and experimental economics techniques to examine risk taking propensity and unhealthy activities, and is a co-PI of another project that utilizes neuroimaging methods (fMRI) to examine the neural mechanisms of intergenerational sacrifice, where a daughter makes decisions to take pain on behalf of her mother or a stranger. Dr. Chao received his M.D. from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and his Ph.D. in Managerial Economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
