Dr. Aylin Sertkaya, an ERG senior economist and vice president, designs and conducts economic and policy analyses in support of a wide variety of public policy initiatives for federal and state agencies. Throughout her career at ERG, she has formed and led teams of economists, statisticians, scientists, and nationally recognized subject experts to support dozens of high-profile policy initiatives, working closely with federal agency economists, researchers, and policymakers. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Network Open, American Journal of Infection Control, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, and Clinical Trials, She has led ERG’s economic and policy analysis practice for over 17 years. 

Dr. Sertkaya has led the design and implementation of over 30 small- and large-scale multimode surveys on behalf of federal and state agencies, with a focus on rigorous methodological standards. Her responsibilities have encompassed all phases of survey research, including probability- and nonprobability-based sample designs, instrument development, cognitive testing, questionnaire programming, and creation of detailed coding and data processing frameworks. She has directed surveys employing web, mail, telephone, and mixed-mode data collection strategies, often incorporating complex weighting schemes and nonresponse bias analyses to support valid population inferences. Most recently for Food and Drug Administration, she led a nationwide multimode survey of commercial drug importers designed to characterize the prevalence and nature of risk control strategies employed to ensure pharmaceutical safety, with particular attention to sampling hard-to-reach small-sized drug importers.

Aylin received a Recognition Award from the Food and Drug Administration for her work on effective quality systems and risk management approaches as part of FDA’s cGMPs (current Good Manufacturing Practices) in the 21st Century initiative. She has held several leadership positions in the Society for Risk Analysis, including president of SRA’s New England chapter, chair of its Economics and Benefit Analysis Specialty Group, and chair of numerous sessions at SRA meetings. She received the SRA Recognition Award for the workshop on expert elicitation methods that she has co-organized for SRA annual meetings since 2008. She has also served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee tasked with examining the long-term health and economic effects of antimicrobial resistance in the United States and contributing to the 2021 NASEM book, Combating Antimicrobial Resistance and Protecting the Miracle of Modern Medicine. Aylin holds a Ph.D. in economics and a B.A. in physics and economics, with a minor in mathematics.