Email cookson@nus.edu.sg

Richard Cookson has helped pioneer “equity-informative” methods of economic evaluation and performance monitoring that provide information about the impacts of interventions and organisations on social inequalities in health and wellbeing, including distributional cost-effectiveness analysis, health equity indicators for healthcare quality assurance, methods for investigating public concern for reducing health inequality, and microsimulation methods for long-term childhood policy analysis. He has also worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and served on various WHO working groups and UK NHS advisory committees including the NHS Resource Allocation Committee (2018-21) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2002-9).

• NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (Adjunct)
• University of York Centre for Health Economics (Primary)

• Health inequality
• Long-term childhood policy modelling

• Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis
• Health economics

• PhD Economics, University of York, 1998

• Professor, Centre for Health Economics, University of York, 2015-date, and Reader 2011-15
• Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, 2006-11
• Senior Lecturer, School of Medicine, Health Policy and Practice, University of East Anglia, 2000-06
• Research Officer, LSE Health, London School of Economics, 1998-2000
• Research Fellow, Centre for Health Economics, University of York, 1997-98

• Co-Director, Equity in Health Policy (Equipol) Research Group, University of York

• Short-Term Consultant to Thailand’s Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP), from 2022
• Honorary Public Health Academic, UK Office of Health Improvement and Disparities, from 2015

• Villadsen, A, Asaria, M, Skarda, I, Ploubidis, G, Mon Williams, M, Brunner, E, & Cookson, R (2023). Clustering of adverse health and educational outcomes in adolescence following early childhood disadvantage: population-based retrospective UK cohort study. The Lancet Public Health, 8, e286-e293
• Skarda, I., Asaria, M., & Cookson, R. (2022). Evaluating childhood policy impacts on lifetime health, wellbeing and inequality: Lifecourse distributional economic evaluation. Social Science and Medicine, 302, 114960.
• Cookson, R, Doran, T, Asaria, M, Gupta, I, Parra Mujica, F. (2021). The inverse care law re-examined: a global perspective. The Lancet 397: 828–38
• Cookson, R, Griffin, S, Norheim OF. and Culyer, AJ. (2020). Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis: quantifying health equity impacts and trade-offs.  Oxford University Press.
• Skarda, I, Miqdad A, and Cookson, R. 2021. LifeSim: A Lifecourse Dynamic Microsimulation Model of the Millennium Birth Cohort. International Journal of Microsimulation, 14(1): 2–42.
• Cookson R, Skarda I, Cotton‐Barratt O, Adler M, Asaria M, Ord T. Quality adjusted life years based on health and consumption: A summary wellbeing measure for cross‐sectoral economic evaluation. Health Economics. 2020;1–16.
• Cookson, R., Robson, M., Skarda, I. and Doran, T. (2021), Equity-informative methods of health services research, Journal of Health Organization and Management, 35,6 665-681.

Click here to see the full list of publications. 

Click here to view Prof Cookson’s staff web page at the University of York