James Altunkaya

James is a health economic modeller using real-world and trial evidence to assess the value for money of new clinical interventions. His research applies economic and epidemiological methods to identify target populations and interventions likely to offer the greatest value in reducing risks of chronic disease.

His current work focuses on two key areas:

First, he is developing and validating new patient-level simulation models of prediabetes and its consequences. These models predict evolution of individual patients’ risk-factor trajectories over time, and patients’ associated long-term health outcomes and costs. This enables estimates of the cost-effectiveness of early precision interventions targeted at specific groups of people with prediabetes, accounting for individual disease histories.

Second, he uses routinely collected primary and secondary care data to characterise health and economic inequalities in the burden of diabetes and related complications across the UK. This work aims to support long-term estimates of the cost-effectiveness of local policies designed to improve implementation of clinical guidelines and increase patients’ uptake of preventive interventions across different inequality groups.

James joined the Economics of Population Health Research Centre (formerly the Health Economics Research Centre) in Oxford in September 2019, where he completed his DPhil between 2022-25 quantifying the economic impact of prediabetes, supported by an NIHR Doctoral Fellowship award. Before this, he held an NIHR Research Methods Fellowship at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York. He also holds an MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.