Padraig Dixon

My research interests relate to economic issues associated with the increasing availability of genetic data, particularly in relation to how these data might be used to support causal inference, screening, and in the evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of stratified therapies. This work encompasses a number of different disease areas (such as cancer and cardiovascular disease), traits (such as adiposity), behaviours (such as smoking), and interventions (such as metagenomics in acute care contexts).

Two current areas of focus are pharmacogenetics and dementia. I am the Principal Investigator of an NIHR grant "Understanding the opportunities and costs of pharmacogenetic-guided prescribing using routinely collected healthcare data". I am also an NIHR Fellow in Dementia Research.  

I am Associate Director in Health Economics for the Central and South Genomic Medicine Service Alliance (GMSA), a Research Fellow in the Ethics and Values theme of Reuben College, Oxford, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Centre for Personalised Medicine at Oxford. I am an Expert Review Committee member for the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and a Research Scholar for the "Our Future Health" cohort. 

I supervise a number of DPhil students.I teach and supervise students on the University's MSc programmes in Evidence-Based Health Care, Translational Health Sciences, and Global Healthcare Leadership. I am course director for the "Economics of Health Care" short course.

I hold degrees in Economics from Trinity College Dublin (BA) and Nuffield College, Oxford (MPhil and DPhil), and in Health Economics from the University of York (MSc). I hold a diploma in Financial Management (DipFM).

Before joining the Department, I completed a three-year Medical Research Council Skills Development Fellowship at the Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol. This personal fellowship used Mendelian Randomization to study the causal effect of traits, behaviours and health conditions on healthcare costs and on quality of life. I also worked for a number of years as an economic consultant in the private sector, advising regulators, governments and large corporates on the economic issues that arise in the regulation of network industries.