James Altunkaya

James joined the Health Economics Research Centre at NDPH in 2019. He previously held a NIHR Research Methods fellowship hosted at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York. James’s research focus is economic evaluation & decision modelling. 

Within public health, James has modelled the value of early intervention to decrease sedentary behaviour in children, and has used choice experiment data to determine optimal strategies to increase blood donation by exploiting geographical variation in donor behaviour. During his fellowship, James was involved in critiquing the economic case for introducing new pharmaceuticals and medical devices into the NHS, as a member of an academic evidence review group commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. More recently, James has contributed to methodological work assessing the potential for decision modelling techniques to extend traditional econometric assessment of health policies. 

James’s current work focusses on the use of patient-level data to inform long-term extrapolation of trials within psychosis and prediabetes, aiming to inform new economic models for these disease areas. He holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from the University of Oxford, and an MSc in Public Health (Health Economics) from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.