Alastair Fischer

Alastair Fischer Ph.D. has had a long career in statistics, economics and public health. He has a BSc from the University of Adelaide majoring in Pure Mathematica and Statistics, a BEc from the Australian National University and a PhD from the University of Adelaide.

He spent 5 years designing and maintaining sample surveys at the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Canberra before returning to Adelaide as a Senior Lecturer in Economics. His research interests during that time covered experimental economics, voting and elections, and the diffusion of innovations. After migrating to the UK in 1996, he taught economics in Cambridge at Trinity College and the University of Cambridge, and in the following year took up a Senior Lectureship in health economics at St George’s Medical School, University of London in the Department of Community Medicine. He was one of the first two health economists to be employed by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) where he remained for 16 years, first in the economic evaluation of drugs and then a longer period in Public Health. His main research interests have been in ambulance economics, economics of diagnosis and the methodology involved in evaluating the prevention of ill-health.

He left NICE in 2016 to become Principal Health Economist at OHE and in 2017 became a Visiting Fellow at OHE, where his main interest is to continue work on methodology.