Rate My Professor Amanda Jones

Dr. Amanda C. Jones is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. She holds a PhD and an MSc. Jones completed her PhD dissertation at the University of Waterloo, focusing on simulating the health gains and cost savings associated with a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in Canada. Prior to joining the University of Otago, she worked as a researcher at the International Development Research Centre, a Canadian research-funding organization. In her current role with the Burden of Disease Epidemiology, Equity and Cost-Effectiveness Programme (BODE³), she conducts primary research and systematic literature reviews to generate inputs for simulation models and to select parameters for cost-effectiveness analyses targeting New Zealand's health priorities.

Jones specializes in population-level interventions for chronic disease prevention, with expertise spanning nutrition policy, alcohol harm reduction, tobacco control, physical activity promotion, and infectious disease prevention. Her contributions include modeling the health impacts of interventions such as sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, which demonstrate reductions in consumption and associated health benefits. Key publications co-authored by Jones are 'Taxes and front-of-package labels improve the healthiness of grocery purchases in a population experiment' (Science Translational Medicine, 2019), 'Beverage consumption and energy intake among Canadians: A population-based analysis' (BMC Public Health, 2019), 'Comparing health gains, costs and cost-effectiveness of 100s of interventions for New Zealand’s ageing population: a mathematical modelling study' (Population Health Metrics, 2022), 'The estimated health impact of alcohol interventions in New Zealand: A modelling study' (Addiction, 2024), and 'The New Zealand drug harms ranking study: A multi-criteria decision analysis' (Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2023). She has presented seminars, such as 'Sugary drinks and the obesity epidemic in Canada' at the University of Otago, contributing evidence to inform public health policies in New Zealand and internationally, including advocacy for effective fiscal measures against obesity and related diseases.