Jennifer Dowd

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.