Salary: minimum £52,606 per year
Location: Public Health England, Colindale, London, NW9 5EQ

This post is funded by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Modelling and Health Economics (www.imperial.ac.uk/hpru-modelling), a partnership of Public Health England, Imperial College London (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/school-public-health/infectious-disease-epidemiology/), and LSHTM (https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-mathematical-modelling-infectious-diseases/research-themes). The HPRU's goal is to improve public health through delivering a step change in research capacity available for health protection modelling. The HPRU focuses analyses that inform policy-making, and it is currently playing a leading role providing analysis to inform policy on COVID-19 nationally and internationally (see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/covid-19-response-team-2020-2021-report/ and https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-mathematical-modelling-infectious-diseases/covid-19).

This post will contribute primarily to the HPRU’s theme on Behaviour & economic drivers of disease transmission and intervention policy effectiveness. The postholder will investigate the implications of methodological choices in economic evaluation, focusing on key topics important to public health such as (i) the effect of long time horizons and discounting on preventive interventions and (ii) incorporating inequality aversion into public health economic evaluations, building on our previous work on approaches to valuing equity in infectious disease / environmental change-related models. Diseases of interest include COVID-19 and antimicrobial-resistant infections.

In addition, the postholder will contribute to other health-economic work of the HPRU, including work on behaviour and public values, which seeks to address the dissonance between national policy and individuals’ choices about prevention and treatment, including vaccine hesitancy. Part of this work is assessing the behavioural data requirements of infectious disease models to inform design of behavioural-economics experiments.

The postholder will work most closely with Dr Julie Robotham (PHE), Prof Mark Jit (LSHTM), and Prof Peter White (PHE & Imperial College London).

Enquiries can be directed to peter.white@phe.gov.uk