Professor of Social Insurance
Kristina Alexanderson is Professor of Social Insurance at the Division of Insurance Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, at the medical university Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. She has for more than 30 years conducted interdisciplinary research mainly on different aspects of sickness absence and disability pension (in general and with specific diagnoses, such as cancer, MS, mental disorders, etc. and in specific groups, e.g., occupations, or life situations (e.g. being older)), using both epidemiological and qualitative analytical methods. She has established some large population-based research datasets and published about 370 original articles in international scientific journals.
Professor in Medical and Social Statistics
Jenny Head is Principal Investigator of the renEWL (Research on Extending Working Lives) research consortium and Professor of Medical and Social Statistics at UCL. Her research focuses on determinants of healthy ageing and healthy working lives. She has extensive experience working with longitudinal studies and is a senior investigator on the Whitehall II study. She also teaches on advanced statistics courses for postgraduate students throughout UCL including ‘Longitudinal Data Analysis’ and ‘Multilevel models for Health Research’.
Professor of Work and Employment
Martin Hyde is a Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Leicester. His main research interests are ageing and later life and he has published on a wide range of topics from quality of life, work and retirement, health inequalities and globalization. He has been involved in a number of large-scale studies including the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Survey for Health, Retirement and Ageing in Europe (SHARE) and the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Study of Health (SLOSH). He is the Chair of the British Society of Gerontology Work and Retirement Group and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. He is a member of the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee for an Ageing Workforce. He is the Editorial Lead for the Journal of Global Ageing, an Associate Editor for Social Theory and Health and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology and Quality in Ageing and Older Adults.
Professor in Public Health
Jussi Vahtera is Professor of Public Health at the University of Turku, Finland. He studies living environments, psychosocial risks, and behaviors as determinants of health and longevity from a life-course perspective. He has experience in working with large longitudinal datasets and has a strong record of research collaboration both nationally and internationally. His recent research has contributed to the understanding of the effects of social, built and natural neighborhoods on cardiovascular health. He is the founder and former PI of the Finnish Public Sector study and an Associate Editor at Occupational and Environmental Medicine (BMJ Publishing Group), a leading international journal in occupational health.
Professor in Epidemiology
Hugo Westerlund is Professor of Epidemiology as well as Director and Head of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University. He investigates how social and psychological exposures across the life course impact on health, mortality and quality of life. A recurrent theme has been labour market participation, and lately a main focus has been on ageing workers and retirement, as well as the prerequisites and consequences of extended working lives. Hugo works mainly with large, longitudinal cohort studies from several different countries, including the French GAZEL, British Whitehall II, and Swedish SLOSH and WOLF studies. He has a large network of leading social epidemiologists and is currently leading a national Swedish infra structure consortium (REWHARD) with data on work, relations and health as well as a Forte financed research programme on healthy and productive work in later life. An overarching ambition is to provide better evidence about causal relationships between modifiable environmental exposures and health outcomes, increasingly taking moderating factors such as personality and genetics into account.
Assistant professor
Kristin Farrants is an Assistant Professor at the Division for Insurance Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests include paid work after age 65, sickness absence and disability pension in white- and blue-collar workers, and psychosocial job exposures in relation to sickness absence and disability pension. She is currently leading several research projects investigating sickness absence among those in paid work over the age of 65.
Associate Professor
Emilie Friberg is an Associate Professor at the Division for Insurance Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Her work includes extensive experience in cohort analyses, database management, use of register data, insurance medicine, and epidemiology. Her research focus is mainly on risk factors and consequences of sickness absence in relation to specific diagnoses, primarily multiple sclerosis, traffic injuries and breast cancer. She is currently leading a project on strategies in relation to extending working life among people with multiple sclerosis.
Associate Professor
Linda Magnusson Hanson is a Associate Professor at the Epidemiology Unit at the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University and study manager for the Swedish Longitudinal Survey of Health – a longitudinal study with multiple repeated measurements on work life, social situation and health. Her main area of research is on psychosocial work characteristics and prospective associations to health, especially mental health. She is currently working on a number of projects on work characteristics, recuperation, work-life balance, depressive symptoms, musculoskeletal pain, cardiometabolic disease.
Professor in Public Health
Sari Stenholm is a professor public health and epidemiology at the Department of Public Health at the University of Turku in Finland. Her main area of research is on modifiable risk factors for healthy aging in a life-course perspective with special interest in obesity, physical activity, sleep and work-related factors. She is the PI of the Finnish Retirement and Aging Study, which aims to examine changes in health behaviors and health during retirement transition and years after retirement.
Professor in Medical and Social Statistics
Paola Zaninotto is a Professor in Medical Statistics and Social Statistics at University College London (UCL). She is a member of the Management Group of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing for which she has worked since its initiation. Her research focuses on trajectories of physical health and well-being in older ages, predictors of healthy life expectancy and working life expectancy, and factors related to work in later life. She is interested in statistical methods for longitudinal data and regularly runs short courses on statistical methods for epidemiology.
Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences
Robin S. Högnäs is Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences within the Epidemiology Unit at the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University. Her primary area of research concerns family, social relationships, employment, and long-term health. She is particularly interested in how social and economic inequality within and between Western social policy contexts affect employment and health outcomes over the life course. She currently works within the Forte-funded project titled Sustainable Work in an Aging Population (SWAP), led by Hugo Westerlund. The main goal of the project is to better understand determinants of individual working life expectancy (WLE) and to contribute knowledge to ongoing efforts and debates to extend working lives.
Chief Researcher
Jenni Ervasti works as Chief Researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH) in Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on occupational health epidemiology. Her core research topics include health-related, socioeconomic, and workplace psychosocial and physical risk factors of work disability and labour force exit. She is specialized in studying large data sets with survey and register data linkages, as well as public sector work. She is the co-PI of the Finnish Public Sector study (PI-role shared with prof. Mika Kivimäki).
Senior Researcher
Brian Beach works in the Research Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at University College London (UCL) and is a member of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) research group. He has recently worked on projects exploring cognitive impairment during the COVID-19 pandemic and later-life depression. He has a background in social gerontology and social policy, with an emphasis on quantitative analysis, employment, unpaid caregiving, and inequalities. Prior to UCL, Brian worked for eight years at the International Longevity Centre UK (ILC). Brian started working in the field of ageing in 2006 for AARP in Washington, DC, and received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2016.
Professor in Psychosocial Work Environment and Health
Reiner Rugulies is Professor of Psychosocial Work Environment and Health at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Affiliated Professor of Psychosocial Medicine at the Section of Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. His main research interest is the contribution of social and psychological conditions to health and illness and health inequalities, in particular psychosocial conditions at work and in particular with regard to mental disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and work disability. He is the Principal Investigator of the Job Exposure Matrix Analyses of Psychosocial Factors and Healthy Ageing in Denmark (JEMPAD) study, a collaborator of the Work Environment and Health in Denmark (WEHD) study and involved in several other national and international cohort studies. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, a leading international occupational health journal.
Senior Researcher
Ida E. H. Madsen is a Senior Researcher affiliated with the Danish National Research Centre for the Working Environment and the Danish National Institute of Public health. Her main research area is psychosocial working conditions, focusing on the impact of psychosocial working conditions on mental health. She has conducted a range of research projects examining the role of working conditions in relation to the risk of clinically significant mental health problems, particularly depression. She is the founder of the Danish Work Life Course Cohort Study, a register based cohort study encompassing all individuals who first entered the Danish workforce during the years 1995-2018, and an Associate Editor of Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health.
Research Scientist
Hanifa Bouziri is a Research Scientist affiliated with the French “Epidemiological Cohorts in Population” Unit, which manages the CONSTANCES cohort. She has a background in epidemiology and public health risk assessment, and obtained her PhD from HESAM University in the Modelling, Epidemiology, and Surveillance of Health Risk (MESuRS) Laboratory. Within the CONSTANCES and Gazel cohorts, her work revolves around two main aspects. Firstly, she is involved in assessing the scientific/technical aspects and the follow-up of projects related to occupational health within the cohort. Secondly, she conducts her own research focused on understanding the multifactorial determinants (exposomes) involved in occupational health. She use epidemiological approaches and mathematical modelling for her research endeavours.”
Senior Researcher
Holendro Singh Chungkham is Senior Researcher at Stress Research Institute, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University. Prior to joining at the Stress Research Institute, he was an Associate Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute. He is trained in Statistics and Demography with emphasis on applications of advanced statistical techniques to longitudinal data. He addresses empirical causal questions of work-stressors (e.g. psychological work demand-control, effort- reward imbalance) on health (e.g. depression), and application of advanced statistical techniques to clustered and longitudinal data (such as, multilevel modeling, GEE, structural equation modeling, marginal structural, mediation, moderation etc.). At present he is working on the estimation of working life expectancy in relation to psychosocial work stressors and health using data from some European countries. Another area of interest is in modeling of missing data for longitudinal design.
Senior Researcher
Ann Dyreborg Larsen is Senior Researcher at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NFA), Copenhagen, Denmark with focus on the psychosocial work environment and working time issues. Further, she is external associate professor in Medical Sociology at the Department of Social medicine, University of Copenhagen. She has her educational background in Public Health Science and Medicine. Ann Dyreborg Larsen’s main research focus lies within in the fields of psychosocial work exposures including working time related exposures as night shift work and long working hours in relation to health, sickness absence and risk of injuries. Along with Ida Elisabeth Huitfeldt Madsen she is project leader on strategic research on sickness absence at NFA. Ann Dyreborg Larsen is principal investigator at several large projects using payroll data and advanced statistical methods.
