Professor Tony Blakely
Tony is an epidemiologist and public health medicine specialist. He is committed to answering questions about which public health interventions will achieve the greatest improvements in health and social outcomes, reduce inequalities in health, and do so cost-effectively. His research covers a range of topic areas, intersected with methodological advancements. Whilst principally an epidemiologist, he uses and combines methods from multiple disciplines: biostatistics, economics, econometrics, and computer and data science.
Tony is Director of the Population Interventions (PI) Unit within the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. PI aims to: "provide robust evidence on the health and cost impacts of population interventions, through causal inference and simulation approaches from epidemiology, economics and data science."
As part of the PI Unit, Tony is leading the Scalable Health Intervention Evaluation program (SHINE), which is a data science and simulation platform to rapidly estimate health, health inequality, cost and productivity impacts of virtually any preventive intervention, in any country. SHINE research includes any preventive intervention that acts through risk factors (e.g. tobacco, body weight, dietary risk factors (e.g. sodium), physical inactivity - and other risk factors included in standard burden of disease studies like the GBD). As such, SHINE does not focus on diseases per se; rather, we include any disease that a risk factor or preventive intervention impacts.