DrMaryam Naghsh Nejad

Maryam Naghsh-Nejad is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE) in the Faculty of Health, and a Research Fellow of the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn.

An economist working at the intersection of health and labour economics, Maryam leads a research program on the economic consequences of health events; how caregiving, infertility, menopause, cancer and severe health shocks reshape careers, household finances and retirement security. These are costs that rarely appear in health budgets because they fall on workplaces, families and saving balances instead, and her work makes them visible and measurable. Gender equity runs throughout: much of the program focuses on health events that fall disproportionately on women, and on the workplace and policy settings that determine how heavily they land.

Her research combines causal inference methods with Australia's population-scale linked administrative and survey data, including PLIDA, the 45 and Up Study, ALSWH and HILDA.

Maryam's work is published in leading international journals including The Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Social Science & Medicine, and Health Policy. Her research on involuntary childlessness and IVF (the first population-level evidence of its kind) received best paper awards at the 2026 Monash Health and Wellbeing Workshop and the 2026 Australasian Health Econometrics Workshop, was named on the Grattan Institute's 2025 Wonk List, and formed the basis of her invited evidence to the NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Fertility Support and Assisted Reproductive Treatment and my participation as a key informant in the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare’s redevelopment of national accreditation standards for assisted reproductive technology services.

She is a Chief Investigator on projects funded by the Australian Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Digital Health CRC and Movember, and works in partnership with industry and government. Her research aligns with UTS and Faculty of Health priorities in digital health, ageing, women's health and Indigenous health.

Maryam chaired the 2024 Australian Gender Economics Workshop, convenes CHERE's Health Econometrics and Data Linkage forum, and served as a member of the UTS Academic Board. She is an accredited Category 1 HDR supervisor and supervises PhD candidates in applied health economics.

Before joining UTS in 2018, Maryam was a Senior Research Associate at IZA in Bonn, where she was Deputy Director of the Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (GLM-LIC) programme, collaborating with academic institutions and policymakers internationally. She holds a PhD in Economics from West Virginia University.