Mark Sculpher
Professor and Head of Department

Profile

Biography

Mark Sculpher is Professor of Health Economics and Head of Department for CHE. He is also Co-Director of the Policy Research Unit in Economic Evaluation of Health and Care Interventions (EEPRU). He has been based at the University of York since 1997. 

Between 1988 and 1997, he worked at the Health Economics Research Group at Brunel University; during 1998 he was a visitor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University in Canada.

Mark has worked extensively in the field of economic evaluation in health, with experience in areas including heart disease and various cancer. He has also contributed to methods in the field, in particular relating to decision analytic modelling and handling uncertainty. He has over 300 peer-reviewed publications and is a co-author of two major text books in the field: Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes (OUP, 2015 with Drummond, Claxton, Torrance, and Stoddart) and Decision Modelling for Health Economic Evaluation (OUP, 2006 with Briggs and Claxton). He was also a member of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine.

Mark was a member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Committee (2004-8), the NICE Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee (2006-9) and the NICE Diagnostics Advisory Committee (2010-20). He chaired NICE's 2004 Task Group on methods guidance for economic evaluation and was a member of the Methods Working Party for the 2008 update of this guidance. He was a member of the Commissioning Board for the UK NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme (2007-10), the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)/Medical Research Council (MRC) Methodology Research Panel (2008-11) and the MRC-NIHR Methodology Research Advisory Group (2016-20). He was a member of the NIHR Policy Research Programme’s Commissioning Panel (2011-14). Mark is a NIHR Senior Investigator (Emeritus) and is a former President of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. In 2024, Mark was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Recent national and international advisory roles include the Singapore Agency for Care Effectiveness International Advisory Panel (2017-18); UK Health Select Committee Availability of Orkambi on the NHS inquiry (2018-19); Portuguese National Authority of Medicines and Health Products (2018-20).

Research

Overview

• Decision analytic modelling, analysis of uncertainty and heterogeneity, pharmaceutical policy, economic evaluation and decision making
• Heart disease, cancer, medical devices, diagnostics, public health

Research group(s)

• Economic evaluation of health technologies
• Global health

Grants

• See York Research Database

Publications

• See Google Scholar page

Teaching

Other teaching

Centre for Health Economics

• Decision analytic modelling for economic evaluation  - Course leader
• Online Advanced Methods of Economic Evaluation for Health Technology Assessment - Co course leader

External activities

Memberships

• Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine
  Member of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine
• National Institute for Health Research
  Senior Investigator (Emeritus)
• Health Economics Study Group 
  Member
• Society of Medical Decision Making 
  Member
• International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research
  Member
• Academy of Medical Sciences
  Fellow

Editorial duties

• Pharmacoeconomics
  Member of the editorial board
• Applied Health Economics and Health Policy
  Member of the editorial board

Recent Presentations 

• Maximising the policy-relevance of economic evaluation: recent methods advances and remaining challenges. Invited lecture at University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. February 2020.
• Economic evaluation of new antibiotics: health still the focus. Virtual ISPOR. May 2020.
• How do we assess the value of cancer drug optimization? International Summit on Interventional Pharmacoeconomics (virtual). July 2020.
• The principles of value frameworks for decision-making in health. Invited talk for ISPOR South Africa (virtual). November 2020.
• Evidence needs for evaluating predictive technologies. Talk at Academy of Medical Sciences FORUM workshop: Precision prevention for modifiable health risks: steps to achieving personalised preventative healthcare. December 2020.