We are seeking a highly skilled and quantitative researcher to join our collaborative project providing cost-effectiveness advice for immunisation policy to the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). An ideal candidate would have a strong background in mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, experience with matching models to data and an interest in health economics or predictions for policy.

The successful candidate would join the MEMVIE team, to be primarily supervised by Prof. Matt Keeling (Warwick Maths & Life Sciences), and also working with Dr Ed Hill (Warwick Maths), Prof. Sophie Staniszewska (Warwick Medical School) and Prof. Stavros Petrou (Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Oxford). This is a recently funded project that extends the high-impact work of MEMVIE over the past 9 years.

Immunisation is a key and highly successful tool in the fight against a range of infectious diseases, but is associated with a considerable cost, with the UK spending in excess of £200 million per year on vaccines and vaccine delivery. Infectious disease and health economic models are therefore necessary to assess whether any change in the immunisation programme is cost-effective; that is, whether the value placed on health benefits or improvements in social welfare that ensue are less than the incremental cost associated with the change in programme. The project will initially extend COVID-19 modelling, but work on other immunisation programmes is likely over the three years.

The University of Warwick has considerable experience and expertise in this area, with the assembled team serving on the several government advisory boards associated with public health. The team brings cutting-edge research techniques in mathematical modelling and health economics to provide a complementary approach to the work undertaken in this area by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). The University of Warwick has a strong international reputation for work on a range of infectious diseases and providing measured policy advice to several government agencies.

Through regular meetings with the DHSC and UKHSA, we ensure that our programme of dynamic and health economic modelling on infectious diseases meets the needs of DHSC (and JCVI), and reports are presented in a way that is of immediate use to policy-makers. In particular, we outline assumptions made, highlight gaps in the necessary data and define how these affect the interpretation of the results. Two other methods are being used to validate our conclusions: firstly, we seek to publish our findings in appropriate journals thereby opening our results to peer-review by the wider international academic community; secondly, we compare our predictions to changes in disease incidence and other health outcomes that follow changes in vaccine policy.

Applications via the HR website should include a CV and list of publications, and a covering letter expressing your interests in this project. All applicants should attempt to get three referees to send their references by email to Alison Glendinning, Departmental Secretary, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick at MathematicsPA@warwick.ac.uk by the closing date.