He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a Bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He has two children, a daughter and a son, and lives near Washington, DC, USA.

Marty Makinen is the Results for Development Institute's Program Director for the Health Workforce and Ministerial Leadership Initiative. He is a health economist with more than 30 years of experience working with health financing and economics issues in developing countries. He spent 23 years at Abt Associates Inc. where he directed the USAID-funded global Health Systems 20/20, Partners for Health Reform plus, and Health Financing and Sustainability projects and has held academic positions at the Universities of Delaware and Michigan. Dr. Makinen has worked with more than 40 developing countries on practical solutions to health issues in all regions of the world, with specific emphasis on Francophone Africa and South Asia. He serves on the Monitoring Independent Review Committee for the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization. He is a native speaker of English and speaks fluent French. Dr. Makinen has numerous publications and speaks frequently at professional meetings. He holds a PhD (1979) and Master's (1975) in economics from the University of Michigan and a B.A. (1973) in economics from Kalamazoo College.

Amanda Folsom has over 14 years of experience in global health policy, health systems, and health care financing. She is a Program Director at the Results for Development Institute (R4D) where she provides program management for the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage (JLN), a platform for exchange between countries implementing health financing reforms aimed at achieving universal health coverage.  Previously she led R4D’s work on the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health (MLI), focusing on enhancing the capacity of ministries of health to effectively lead health care reforms,  and also participated in R4D’s technical work on private health sector assessments (Republic of Congo), policy translation, and the stewardship of mixed (public/private) health care systems.

Prior to joining R4D Ms. Folsom directed the AcademyHealth International Exchange Program, "Learning from Other Industrialized Health Systems," and worked on several complementary projects including the MacArthur Foundation initiative on the ethical recruitment of foreign-educated nurses, the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Knowledge Transfer program, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Coverage Initiatives.

Previously Ms. Folsom was Deputy Director for Program Evaluation and Legislation for the Maryland Medicaid program where she led several public program design, implementation, and evaluation efforts. She also worked with the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She served for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps community health volunteer in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Ms. Folsom is a graduate of the University of Virginia and holds a Masters in Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.