Christina Pagel is a British–German mathematician and professor of operational research at University College London. She is the first female director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at UCL, which applies operational research, data analysis and mathematical modelling to problems in health care. Pagel also holds an honorary researcher position within Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Pagel's early career was spent in Boston, Massachusetts, studying the scattering of electrons in interplanetary space using data from the ACE spacecraft at Boston University with Professor Nancy Crooker. In 2005 she left physics, returning to London to take up a position with the UCL Clinical Operational Research Unit applying mathematics to problems in health care. In 2016, Pagel was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice by the Commonwealth Fund, through which Pagel spent 2016–2017 in the USA researching the priorities of Republican and Democrat politicians for the goals of national health policy working with the Milbank Memorial Fund and how clinical decision support systems can be better implemented within intensive care settings. During that year, she also completed a fellowship at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Pagel's current research uses approaches from mathematical modelling, operational research and data sciences to help people within the health service make better decisions. She focuses on mortality and morbidity outcomes following cardiac surgery in children and adults in the UK, leading and contributing to several large national projects; understanding the course of a child's stay in paediatric intensive care; mathematical methods to support service delivery within hospitals. Pagel was instrumental in developing a statistical model to take into account the complexity of individual children with congenital heart disease, when considering a hospital's survival rate. This led to the Partial Risk Adjustment in Surgery model, which has been used by the National Congenital Heart Disease Audit since 2013 to publish hospital survival rates, and the associated software, developed by Pagel, has been purchased by all UK hospitals performing children's heart surgery. She then led a multidisciplinary project working with the Children's Heart Federation, Sense about Science and Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter to build a website on survival after children's heart surgery, launched in 2016. In 2019 Pagel was awarded the Lyn Thomas Impact Medal from the Operational Research Society, along with her colleagues Dr Sonya Crowe and Prof Martin Utley. The award was made for their work related to congenital heart disease and recognised the "significant impact on the lives of children with congenital heart disease, as well on their families and the growing population of adults with the condition."
Pagel is active in school and university outreach, encouraging participation in mathematics and science subjects. Her work in developing the children's heart surgery website formed the basis of a national guide for researchers in how to involve the public and was separately featured in a Health Foundation guide on engagement. She also contributed to the Sense about Science guide "Making Sense of Statistics".
Politics and policy
Pagel uses tools from her research to design and analyse political data from public polls, particularly in the context of Brexit and health policy, and she is known as a regular podcast contributor on both themes. In May 2020, Pagel joined the committee, whose aim is to offer independent advice to the UK Government during the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of her work for Independent SAGE, she has been quoted in several newspapers and appeared on ITV News, Sky News, and BBC Newsnight discussing the UK response to the pandemic.
