Professor Aki Tsuchiya

I am a health economist, but it took me a while to find it. My first undergraduate degree was in law and politics, and then I studied philosophy and ethics.

After an MA in ethics, I wanted to do a PhD in ethics but was turned down and I’m now grateful for the rejection. I was interested in priority setting in life/death situations, which lead to health economics.

After an MA in economics, I was awarded a PhD in 1999 from Kyoto University in Japan. I migrated to the UK as a post-doc and joined the University of Sheffield in 2000 as a Research Associate at the School of Health and Related Research. I have held the joint appointment since 2005, and have been a professor since 2011.

My research interests involve putting numbers on things that people may think should not be quantified. I have worked in the area of health state valuation - where we survey members of the public to see how they numerically value different aspects of health.

I now work on inequality aversion - this is where we try to quantify how important people think it is to reduce inequalities, say, in lifetime health by social class.

Since 2005, I have been the Course Director for MSc in Economics and Health Economics, a specialist MSc course taught between the Department of Economics and the School of Health and Related Research.

I am very proud of all the graduate students from different backgrounds whom I’ve supervised over the years, some as MSc students, others as PhD students, and a few as both. It is a great joy to see our graduates making their careers as health economists in the real world.