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Contact information


koen.pouwels@phc.ox.ac.uk

Koen Pouwels

Associate Professor in Health Economics


Dr Koen Pouwels is an Associate Professor associated with Kellogg College. He previously held posts as modeller and health economists at the Health Economics Research Centre at the University of Oxford (2019-2024) and Public Health England (now UKHSA, 2015-2018). He is leading a programme of research that focuses on infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) modelling, optimising infectious disease surveillance, economic evaluations alongside trials, and comparison of different statistical approaches relevant to infectious disease research. He also is the data and economics expert member of the Government’s Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Prescribing, Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (APRHAI) which provides practical and scientific advice to the government on minimising the risk of healthcare associated infections. 

Koen has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Science, Nature Medicine, and BMJ. His work has directly informed national COVID-19 mitigation and testing strategies, vaccination policies against various infectious diseases, as well as national targets for antibiotic prescribing in primary care. His portfolio of work is funded by a wide range of funders, including the Wellcome Trust, UKRI, NIHR, European Commision, Ineos Oxford Institute (IOI) for AMR research, UKHSA, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Waltham Foundation. In addition, he received the Medical Research Foundation Emerging Leaders Prize in 2021 for his work on COVID-19 and AMR. He currently supervises a growing team of postdoctoral researchers, DPhil students, and pre-doctoral students. His team has recently won the 2024 Vivli AMR Surveillance Data Challenge Grand Prize Award. 

Koen is interested in supervising undergraduate, MSc, pre-doctoral, or DPhil students on projects combining infectious disease models with health-economic models to inform policies in the UK and other high-income countries, as well as policies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In addition, he is interested in supervising projects on methodological or applied research relevant to the epidemiology and health-economics of infectious diseases.