Co –Speaker Prof Thomas Astell-Burt is a Founding Co-Director of the PowerLab and an NHMRC Boosting Dementia Research Leadership Fellow. Thomas will outline some recent news and findings by the PowerLab in the area of population health environmental data science.

Anne McMunn is Professor of Social Epidemiology and is currently Head of the Research Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at UCL as well as Deputy Director of the ESRC International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society & Health. With interdisciplinary training in both social science and public health, her research focuses on social determinants of health within a life course epidemiological framework, often from a gender perspective and increasingly with a focus on the biosocial interface. Her research draws on the UK’s wealth of longitudinal population data investments to investigate the potential influence on health and wellbeing of work characteristics, including gender divisions of labour and caregiving, and social and family relationships, as well as the impact of social change in this area on children and families.

Seminar abstract: The Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at UCL has a long history of research in health inequalities and the social determinants of health. Within the department, The International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society and Health (ICLS) was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council eleven years ago to make use of the UK’s large, longitudinal population data investments to investigate the material, behavioural, psychological, and particularly biological, pathways through which social circumstances influence health over the life course. This seminar will introduce this work and some of the path and trajectory models used in ICLS life course research. We will then select one area of social determinants research, that of work and employment, to review some of the ICLS evidence linking various aspects of (un)employment, job quality and gender divisions of labour with health and biomarker health risk factors in UK longitudinal data sets.

Further reading