Ingrid van Dijk

Ingrid van Dijk is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Economic Demography and Department of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. She works on long-term changes in population health and mortality, focusing on intergenerational patterns, family health similarities, and the impact of childhood environments on lifelong well-being. Her research combines historical and modern population registers from Sweden, the Netherlands, and the US with survey data to explore health inequalities across centuries.

Her work contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for health and inequality reduction. She holds an ERC Starting Grant for the project Relative Health (2025-2028) and has received grants from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (Forte) and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. She supervises PhD student Isa Barraclough and teaches courses on Population and Living Standards, Kin and Health, and Research Design.

• Key research areas: Historical demography, Life course health, Family health transmission, Colonial health legacies
• Selected publications: 2025 work on childhood neighborhoods and late-life hospital admissions, 2024 studies on marital health benefits and infant disease exposure, 2023 research on metabolomics and long-lived ancestors
• Scientific distinctions: Interstellar Initiative for Early Career Researchers on Healthy Ageing (2021), PAA Best Poster Award (2021)