Professor Bruce Rasmussen's work has encompassed health economics, regional economics, innovation and economic development. His most recent work has been on estimating the economic returns to investment in health for WHO, UNICEF and the UNFPA, with previous work done for the US Chamber of Commerce, APEC Life Sciences Innovation Forum (LSIF) and the APEC Business Advisory Council.

Currently, with the VISES team, he is working on an investment case in adolescent wellbeing for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) (hosted at the WHO) as part of the work for the Global Forum for Adolescents in October 2023. In 2022, he led an investment case for the WHO to increase its funding levels. He recently completed a project for UNICEF on the cost of not investing in education in Syria. Results of the investigation will be presented to the Syrian Minister of Education and the Global Forum for Education in June 2023.He is also Chief Investigator in a study for the Ford Foundation on exploring ways in which China’s development finance can become more effective in providing equitable development in Global South countries.

In 2015-2016, he led the work on a UNFPA adolescent project on evaluating interventions to reduce child marriage and intimate partner violence. Other multi-country evaluation studies have estimated the benefit-cost ratios for interventions to treat disease and health conditions for children and mothers, those with mental health issues and for a range of interventions to improve the well-being of adolescents. Two papers with results were published in The Lancet (2017) and Journal of Adolescent Health (2019) on the evaluation child marriage interventions. He led work in Burundi for UNICEF to develop an investment evaluation framework to establish economic and social returns from health and education programs for adolescents.

He has also conducted research for the US Chamber of Commerce on health and productivity. This work estimated the economic cost of absenteeism, presenteeism and early retirement, with research being conducted in China.

From August 2017, Bruce was Vice Chair (Academic) of the APEC Life Sciences Innovation Forum, where he led work on encouraging Ministers and Ministries of Finance in the APEC region to more actively engage in developing innovative ways of financing health.

Previously, Bruce had a career specialising in finance, spanning the senior levels of both the public and private sectors. In government, he held a number of senior positions, most significantly as Assistant Director General, Finance in the Victorian Treasury. He also spent seven years at the ANZ Bank, where he held various senior business strategy roles, most notably as Chief Manager, Retail Strategy in the Retail Bank and Chief Manager, Development of the Private Bank.