I am a Reader in the Centre for Health Economics, conducting interdisciplinary research aimed at tackling healthcare challenges and improving decision-making and implementation in healthcare policy. My research is centred around using systems thinking and modelling approaches in health economics evaluation and draws on tools and methods from mathematical epidemiology, economics, management science, and computer science, among other fields.

My main body of work involves systems modelling and simulation, and it involves integrating disease and economic models for policy impact evaluation and prioritisation. I am interested in both infectious disease and non-communicable disease modelling. From a methodological standpoint, I am particularly interested in strengthening rigour in agent-based modelling and hybrid models, which integrate modelling methods when this simplifies analyses. I have applied my research to studying and conducting knowledge-exchange activities addressing global health challenges. This includes conducting healthcare intervention and policy evaluations, studying health systems strengthening in low- and middle-income countries, studying antimicrobial resistance policy globally and in the UK, evaluating COVID-19 policy and interventions, investigating how behaviour and social structure affect health and diseases, and exploring the role of incentives in healthcare policy design.

I hold a PhD in Management Science, specialising in modelling for healthcare policy, from the University of Strathclyde and an MA in economics and BA honours economics from McGill University, in Montreal.

I am a computational archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, where I direct the Computational Archaeology Laboratory. My research integrates geospatial analysis, agent-based and simulation modeling, and complex adaptive systems theory to investigate long-term human–environment interactions, with particular attention to socio-environmental change associated with early farming and herding in Mediterranean and other semi-arid landscapes. I have conducted field and modeling research in regions including Italy, Jordan, and Central Asia, and my work spans landscape archaeology, land-use dynamics, and environmental modeling. I have been a member of the CoMSES community for well over a decade and have contributed multiple models to the Computational Model Library, several of which have undergone formal peer review. In addition to research, I regularly teach with agent-based models at undergraduate and graduate levels and use CoMSES models as both research and pedagogical resources. I am committed to open, reproducible, and theoretically informed computational modeling and to strengthening the role of peer-reviewed models as durable scholarly contributions.

Jake Saunders is a current PhD student at the University of Manchester studying various aspects of agent-based modelling for epidemiological purposes.