Tony Blakely

Tony Blakely, MBChB, MPH, PhD, is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne and Affiliate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. From 1998 to 2019 he was at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, where he was Director of the Burden of Disease Epidemiology, Equity and Cost Effectiveness program (BODE³).

Dr. Blakely is committed to answering questions about which public health interventions will achieve the greatest improvements in health and social outcomes, reduce inequalities in health, and do so cost-effectively. The aim of the Population Interventions Unit he leads at the University of Melbourne is: “to provide robust evidence on the health and cost impacts of population interventions, through causal inference and simulation approaches from epidemiology, economics and data science.” Burden of disease, comparative risk assessment and simulation modelling methods are central to this endeavor. The topics of his research are wide and varied, including: interventions addressing tobacco, overweight and obesity, and physical activity; health inequalities; and non-communicable diseases generally. He also teaches contemporary and advanced epidemiological methods.

Dr. Blakely has been collaborating with IHME since 2018 on the adaptation of the VIVARIUM simulation model to undertake macro-simulation of population-level interventions (e.g. tobacco tax).

IHME was established at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2007. Its mission is to deliver to the world timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence to improve health policy and practice.