Jennifer Dowd

Professor Jennifer Dowd serves as Professor of Demography and Population Health at the University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Her interdisciplinary work integrates demography, epidemiology, and social science to investigate how socioeconomic factors influence biological processes and health outcomes across the lifespan.

Her academic training includes:

• PhD in Demography and Economics from Princeton University
• Postdoctoral fellowship as Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at University of Michigan

Dr. Dowd's research centers on the biological embedding of social inequality, examining how socioeconomic status shapes immune function, infection susceptibility, and chronic disease trajectories in aging populations. She pioneers studies on social determinants of the human microbiome and investigates drivers of stalled life expectancy in high-income nations through her ERC-funded MORTAL project. Her methodological approach combines longitudinal cohort analysis with interdisciplinary frameworks from economics and infectious disease modeling to reveal mechanisms linking social structures to physiological health outcomes.

Recent publications (2025) demonstrate consistent focus on life course epidemiology using international cohort data, with emerging themes in pandemic mortality analysis, generational health disparities, and immunological aging. Key methodological strengths include compositional data analysis and cause-of-death decomposition techniques applied across diverse populations from British birth cohorts to 24-country mortality datasets.

Scientific recognition includes:

• ERC Consolidator Grant for MORTAL project
• Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar fellowship

As Principal Investigator of the €2M ERC Consolidator Grant, Dr. Dowd leads multinational research on US/UK life expectancy stagnation while directing pandemic mortality analysis for global policy. She co-founded 'Those Nerdy Girls'—an all-female science communication collective translating complex health research for public audiences—demonstrating commitment to knowledge mobilization beyond traditional academic channels.

Dr. Dowd's research ecosystem spans the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Nuffield Department of Population Health, where she collaborates with immunologists, economists, and data scientists on projects ranging from microbiome-social interaction studies to real-time pandemic mortality surveillance. Her lab integrates biological sampling with social survey data to develop novel metrics of 'social weathering' in population health.