Ben Amies-Cull

Ben Amies-Cull is a clinical scientist in obesity policy and leads the simulation modelling work at the Health Behaviours Team. His interdisciplinary work spans health economics, epidemiology and policy analysis, complementing practice as a GP. 

His work addresses priority questions facing our healthcare and social care systems on how Public Health and Primary Care approaches can alleviate the unsustainable burden of preventable non-communicable disease. This work includes understanding how different approaches best complement one another to reduce disease burden, costs and inequalities. He addresses important issues in how best to complete health economic evaluations for these interventions and present the evidence to policymakers for direct impact.

His simulation modelling work revolves around the development and application of the PRIMEtime model structure, to estimate the long-term health impacts of interventions on weight and diet-related risk. He has particular focus on obesity, lifecourse epidemiology and the synthesis of complex evidence for public policy.

At PHC, he works across a range of high-profile projects including the COPPER project, LEAP, NESIE and BRC Oxford Health. He is Co-I on the Cambridge University project to evaluate the health impacts of planning policy around takeaway food outlets. In addition, works on secondment to the Health Foundation REAL Centre at Nuffield Department of Population Health, addressing the determinants of Social Care demand. He completed DPhil at Nuffield Department of Population Health, which involved building a simulation model to allow the long-term health and healthcare cost impacts of BMI interventions to be estimated at the local authority level to inform policymaking.

Alongside his research programme, he has wide-ranging teaching experience, including on statistics and epidemiology on the NDPH Masters in Global Health Sciences and Epidemiology, evidence in public policy on the Blavatnik School Masters in Public Policy, and Public Health on the BSc Human Sciences. He has a Masters in Health Policy from Imperial College, following an intercalated Masters by Research focusing on qualitative methods as part of his medical degree at the University of Manchester. He works as a GP in an inner-city area.

He is recruiting for potential DPhil students and always looking to grow contacts in policymaking bodies and think tanks - please contact via email.