Junior Faculty Fellow Spotlight: Allison Portnoy, ScD, Boston University School of Public Health

Allison Portnoy, Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, develops innovative quantitative methods to improve population health. Her research connects public health policy, health equity, and quantitative methods, showing how vaccination impacts health and economic outcomes — and providing policy makers with actionable insights for real-world decisions.

In this Q&A, Dr. Portnoy discusses her research and the ways the Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellowship advances her work.

Can you describe your research focus and its applications?

My research has focused on economic evaluation and public health policy, simulation modeling, health equity, and the impact of vaccination on population health and economic outcomes. The health and economic impact modelling central to my work is a key tool to examine diseases such as cervical cancer for which it is difficult to observe the full time-horizon necessary to evaluate the impact of an intervention, but also to capture salient strategies that might not otherwise have mechanisms that we can observe with pilot studies or at scale. Generating this type of evidence has contributed to coverage policies, clinical guidelines and practice recommendations, vaccine financing and investment strategies, and a number of other public health policy areas.

How did you become interested in this? Was there something that inspired this area of interest?

My interest in the value of vaccination extends back to 2007 when I conducted a research project on access and uptake of the recently licensed human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for an undergraduate health policy seminar at Stanford University after listening to an NPR radio report on low HPV vaccine coverage in the United States. I realized a desire to develop my own modeling on the value of vaccination that specifically addresses broader economic impacts of vaccination, particularly regarding outcomes relevant to vulnerable populations.

What are the main goals or objectives of your research?

Over the past thirteen years, my research and scholarship has had three key goals: (1) developing mathematical models to evaluate the comparative- and cost-effectiveness of disease prevention policies; (2) conducting analyses to estimate the health and economic impacts of vaccines including and beyond traditional cost-effectiveness analysis; and (3) estimating vaccine impact with due consideration for the disease and health system contexts of interventions and policy-relevant uncertainties.

Has there been a recent development or finding that you find particularly exciting?

At the end of 2024, I was awarded a pilot grant from the BU/BMC Cancer Center to estimate the impact and cost-effectiveness of self-collected human papillomavirus (HPV) testing among under-screened persons with a cervix in the United States, when self-collected testing had not yet been approved for at-home use by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. The approval for self-collected at-home HPV testing happened in May 2025, so now I am in position to contribute promptly on the potential implications for cervical cancer prevention.

Is there a specific paper or project grant that you’d like to highlight? If so, can you explain the main ideas of it?

I led a series of economic analyses on a World Health Organization (WHO) funded collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to estimate the economic and equity impacts of future, novel tuberculosis (TB) vaccines as part of a Full Value of Vaccine Assessment, which aims to make the case for continued investment in vaccine development and support a range of decisions for both development and adoption by global and country stakeholders. We assessed future costs, cost-savings, and cost-effectiveness of introducing novel TB vaccines in 105 countries for a range of product characteristics and delivery strategies. We also assessed the potential financial risk protection benefits and the impact on gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP growth from introducing novel TB vaccines.

These analyses contributed to a WHO report that describes the full value proposition and investment case for new TB vaccines. More information about this work can be found here.

What do you feel is most rewarding about your work, either as a professor or researcher?

By focusing on the translation of evidence to policy and exploring advanced methods in simulation modeling and economic evaluation, my work has meaningfully contributed to the body of evidence to make decisions and implement policies for vaccine-preventable disease prevention.

How do you plan on using this fellowship opportunity?

I am looking forward to leveraging expertise from other fields to inform my simulation modeling methodology, particularly in terms of optimizing efficiency — which will further enable my ability to answer policy relevant research questions and hopefully obtain additional grant funding. Building relationships within the Boston University community will serve to increase and enhance the dimensions across which I can answer country-level questions to support population health globally.