Rate My Professor Nhung Nghiem

Nhung Nghiem holds a PhD in Economics from Massey University, with her doctoral thesis on optimal forest management for carbon sequestration and biodiversity published in 2011. She serves as a Research Fellow and former Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health, University of Otago Wellington, within the Health Sciences Division. Previously a key member of the Burden of Disease Epidemiology, Equity and Cost-Effectiveness (BODE³) Programme, her career at Otago spans research in health economics and modelling since around 2011. She currently holds an honorary associate professor title linked to her Otago work. In 2019, she received a Marsden Fund Fast Start Award of $300,000 from the Royal Society of New Zealand for a project using artificial intelligence to predict diabetes complications and healthcare costs.

Nghiem specializes in public health modelling, economic evaluations of interventions for disease prevention, and assessments of environmental and climate impacts on health. Her research addresses health equity, cost-effectiveness, food pricing strategies, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, multimorbidity, and COVID-19 effects. With 106 publications and over 2,150 citations, key works include 'The effect of food taxes and subsidies on population health and health costs: a modelling study' (2020, The Lancet Public Health); 'Potential effect of real-world junk food and sugar-sweetened beverage taxes on population health, health system costs and greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand: a modelling study' (2022, BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health); 'Health promoting and demoting consumption: What accounts for budget share differentials by ethnicity in New Zealand' (2022); 'Predicting high health-cost users among people with multimorbidity' (2023, Health Economics Review); and 'Predicting the risk of diabetes complications using machine learning and social administrative data in Aotearoa New Zealand' (2024). Her modelling has informed New Zealand's tobacco endgame legislation (2022), European cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines (2016), and policy evidence on sustainable diets and unemployment's health impacts. She has contributed to scientific grant assessment panels for the New Zealand Health Research Council.