Life expectancy improvements have slowed in many high-income countries including the UK and US, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Dowd will summarise recent trends and discuss prospects for the future of mortality, including lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges and opportunities related to the obesity epidemic, the importance of social determinants of health, and emerging reasons for both optimism and pessimism.
Jennifer Dowd is Professor of Demography and Population Health, and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. She received her PhD from Princeton University in Demography and Economics and did postdoctoral training in Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. In her current five-year European Research Council Consolidator project, she is exploring the reasons underlying stalling life expectancy in the US, UK, and Europe. You can follow her on X.
