Our Employees:
William Winfrey
Senior Economist
Dr. William Winfrey joined the Futures Institute following almost thirteen years
at Constella Futures and its predecessor organization The Futures Group International.
Dr. Winfrey has extensive experience in reproductive health policy research and
analysis, modeling the impacts of reproductive health interventions and social
marketing research.
At Constella Futures, Dr. Winfrey coordinated working groups for poverty in both
the Health Policy Initiative Task Order I and the Measure Evaluation Project.
Previous to this he was the director of the Finance and Planning element in the
POLICY II Project. Dr. Winfrey was also the director of research within the Center
for Private Sector and Communications at Constella Futures.
Dr. Winfrey was one of the leading forces in adapting market segmentation techniques
to define the role of the public and private sectors for meeting reproductive health needs
of a country’s population. He is an expert in estimating the costs and expenditures
associated with delivering health services. He was instrumental in developing WHO’s
estimate of global expenditures on TB diagnostics. He has developed country level
estimates of family planning services, delivery of services for orphans and
vulnerable children and a global estimate of the costs associated with
unsafe abortion.
In his role as director of research with the Center for Private Sector and Communications,
Dr. Winfrey created appropriate, innovative plans for meeting the research, monitoring
and evaluation needs of social marketing and other communications projects. He was
an early proponent and implementer of willingness to pay surveys using the techniques
of contingent valuation. These surveys helped set prices for preventive health
commodities that were affordable and moved toward sustainability. He also adapted
psychographic techniques from the commercial world to help develop strategies for
targeting subpopulations needing reproductive health services.
Dr. Winfrey has bachelor’s degrees in Chemical Engineering and Petroleum Engineering.
Following two years of Peace Corps experience in Mali, Dr. Winfrey earned a
doctorate in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
