Ieva Skarda
Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Dr. Ieva Skarda is a Research Fellow at CHE, working as part of the Economic Evaluation research group and the interdisciplinary Equity in Health Policy (Equipol) research group. Ieva is developing new microsimulation methods for long-term childhood policy analysis. 

Together with colleagues, Ieva has pioneered a life-course approach for evaluating childhood policies in terms of their long-term effects on health, wellbeing and associated inequalities. She has also led the development of LifeSim, a UK birth cohort microsimulation model designed to implement this approach in practice. 

Furthermore, Ieva has helped to introduce a new wellbeing metric for long-term evaluation of cross-sectoral policies – the Wellbeing Quality Adjusted Life Year. This metric aligns with the new UK Treasury Wellbeing Guidance for Appraisal and provides a practical way of evaluating policies with impacts on both health and living standards.

Ieva’s research has been published in leading journals such as Health Economics, Society for Social Medicine and The Lancet Public Health. Her methods have gained recognition among academics; for instance, her approach has been adopted by public health modelling experts at the Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research to evaluate school-based interventions. Her work has also attracted interest from policy analysts across local and central government, as well as from independent think tanks. 

Ieva has established networks and collaborations both nationally and internationally, working with researchers at institutions such as University College London, the University of Sheffield, the University of Liverpool, the University of Essex, the University of Bergen, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Duke University.

Ieva holds a PhD in Economics from the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York. She was awarded the Economic and Social Research Council (+3) PhD Studentship.