MORTAL ERC Consolidator Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101002587)

The MORTAL team (Left to Right): Katarzyna Doniec, Jennifer Dowd, Andrea Tilstra & Antonino Polizzi

Jenn is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Award “Understanding mortality: Biosocial determinants across cohorts, time and space” (MORTAL). The €2 million, 5 year project will run from June 2021-May 2026.

The health and longevity of a population is a key barometer of overall welfare, reflecting the cumulative effects of the broader social, economic, and environmental conditions in which people live.

MORTAL will combine a biosocial approach with demographic theory to understand the underlying drivers of population mortality, including stalling life expectancy improvements in the US and UK.

Read the announcement here.

Recent MORTAL publications:

Dowd, J. B., Doniec, K., Zhang, L., & Tilstra, A. (2024). US exceptionalism? International trends in midlife mortality. International journal of epidemiology, 53(2).

Degtiareva, E., Tilstra, A. M., Schoeley, J., Kashyap, R., & Dowd, J. B. (2024). Cause-Specific Excess Mortality in the US During the COVID-19 Pandemic. medRxiv, 2024-03.

Polizzi, A., & Dowd, J. B. (2024). Working-age mortality is still an important driver of stagnating life expectancy in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(4), e2318276121.

Gimeno, L., Goisis, A., Dowd, J. B., & Ploubidis, G. B. (2024). Generational differences in physical health and disability in the United States and Europe. medRxiv, 2024-01.

Frey, A., Tilstra, A. M., & Verhagen, M. D. (2024). Inequalities in healthcare use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1894.

Tilstra, A. M., Polizzi, A., Wagner, S., & Akimova, E. T. (2024). Projecting the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on US population structure. Nature Communications, 15(1), 2409.

Bridger Staatz, C., Gutin, I., Tilstra, A., Gimeno, L., Moltrecht, B., Moreno-Agostino, D., Moulton, V., Narayanan, M.K., Dowd, J.B., Gaydosh, L. and Ploubidis, G.B., 2023. Midlife Health in Britain and the US: A comparison of Two Nationally Representative Cohorts. medRxiv, pp.2023-12.

Dowd, J. B., Angus, C., Zajacova, A., & Tilstra, A. M. (2023). Comparing trends in mid-life ‘deaths of despair’in the USA, Canada and UK, 2001–2019: is the USA an anomaly? BMJ open, 13(8), e069905.

Angus, C., Buckley, C., Tilstra, A. M., & Dowd, J. B. (2023). Increases in ‘deaths of despair’during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the United Kingdom. Public health, 218, 92-96.

Schöley, J., Aburto, J.M., Kashnitsky, I., Kniffka, M.S., Zhang, L., Jaadla, H., Dowd, J.B. and Kashyap, R., (2022). Life expectancy changes since COVID-19. Nature human behaviour, 6(12), pp.1649-1659.

Aburto, J. M., Tilstra, A. M., Floridi, G., & Dowd, J. B. (2022). Significant impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on race/ethnic differences in US mortality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(35), e2205813119.