Jennifer Dowd
PhD
Professor of Demography and Population Health
Jenn Dowd is Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Demographic Science Unit.
She is a quantitative social and health scientist with interdisciplinary training in demography, economics, epidemiology and infectious disease. Her research seeks to understand how social and biological processes interact over the life course and how social factors “get under the skin” to impact health.
She has explored how socioeconomic status shapes immune function, infection risk, and their links with chronic diseases of aging. Ongoing projects include understanding the social determinants of the human microbiome and the causes of stalling life expectancy in the US and UK as Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project MORTAL.
She also researches the population mortality impacts of COVID-19 and is part of an all-female team of PhD health scientists interpreting and curating COVID-19 and other science for a general audience at Those Nerdy Girls.
Dr Dowd received her PhD from Princeton University in Demography and Economics from the Office of Population Research. She did postdoctoral training in Epidemiology as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar in the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan.
Recent publications
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Cohort differences in physical health and disability in the United States and Europe.
Journal article
Gimeno L. et al, (2024), J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci
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Why is life expectancy in England and Wales falling behind? A cause-of-death decomposition approach.
Preprint
Polizzi A. et al, (2024)
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An undue emphasis on rural older adults in the Chief Medical Officer's annual report 2023?
Journal article
Cheetham NJ. et al, (2024), Clin Med (Lond), 24
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Cause-Specific Excess Mortality in the US During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Preprint
Degtiareva E. et al, (2024)
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Working-age mortality is still an important driver of stagnating life expectancy in the United States.
Journal article
Polizzi A. and Dowd JB., (2024), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 121