Academic Profile

Jenn Dowd is currently Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. She earned her PhD from Princeton University and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan.

Jenn 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. In her recently funded 5-year Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC),  she will explore reasons underlying stalling life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe.

Jenn is currently researching social and demographic factors related to COVID-19, and is also a founding member of an all-female team of PhD health scientists interpreting and curating COVID-19 science for a general audience at Dear Pandemic.