Professor Meena Kumari, Director of ISER will host a special guest ISER seminar speaker, Professor Jennifer Beam Dowd from the University of Oxford, to present We Contain Multitudes: The Microbiome, ‘Omics and the Future of Biosocial Science – in the large seminar room on Thursday 28 May, speaker at 1.30pm, and sandwiches from 1pm. This event is jointly supported by Soc-B doctoral training programme and ISER’s ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change. You can register to attend here
Jenn Dowd 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 studied how socioeconomic status shapes immune function and risk of infections as well as links between infections and chronic diseases of aging. On-going 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 is currently researching social and demographic factors related to COVID-19, and is also 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.
She is a highly cited scholar who has published over 100 articles in journals in interdisciplinary journals such as the Proceedings of National Academies of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and Social Science and Medicine. She has been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on multiple large grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health on topics including the role of infections and immunity in health inequalities and social and population science approaches to the microbiome. She is a former elected member of the Population Association of America (PAA) Board of Directors and on the Editorial Board of the flagship journal Demography. In 2022, she was awarded the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Mid-Career Achievement by the PAA.