Be curious, not judgmental.
Welcome to Data for Health! I’m Jennifer Beam Dowd, a demographer, epidemiologist, 🇺🇸 in 🇬🇧 and all-around data nerd. I’m currently a Professor at Oxford in the Department of Population Health and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (chock full of many data nerds). You can check out my scientific papers on Google Scholar here.
I fell in love with data and statistics when I realized what powerful tools they were for understanding (and hopefully improving) the world. My first academic passion of understanding poverty led me to study economics as a graduate student at Princeton University. Discovering the strong ties between income levels and health was my “a-ha” moment—surely depriving people of health and years of life was even worse than depriving them of money? Economics, demography and later epidemiology gave me the tools for analyzing data to better understand why some people live healthier, longer lives than others. This also opened up a new world of biology for me, combining social and economic data with biological measures of aging, immune function, genetics, and even the microbiome.
This mix of skills put me in a good position to process the firehose of information coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Besides researching the mortality burden of the pandemic across countries, I helped launch a science communication platform called Dear Pandemic (aka, Those Nerdy Girls) to distill the science and provide practical guidance. Through that experience, I learned how desperately we need science to be communicated effectively and made more accessible. I also learned the importance of communicating science with humility and empathy, two qualities in short supply in today’s information ecosystem.
With Data for Health, I hope to demystify the health and science data that matters for your life. I intend to cover the timely infectious disease and other health news I’ve been writing about for a while, but also do some deeper dives into emerging science and the fields I work most closely in like chronic disease and aging. Most importantly, in this time of great uncertainty for public health and science, I want to earn your trust. I deeply believe in science as a process, not a fixed set of facts. I am always willing to question and test my own beliefs and change my mind when warranted. I promise to give you my honest takes, while acknowledging sources of uncertainty and where we need more data.
While I have lived in the UK for almost ten years, I grew up in Nebraska and Texas- and so really miss college football. I am lucky to have a fantastic partner and 3 amazing kids (all now in college but pictured below at my PhD graduation). When I am not crunching data, I love hiking, travel, and country music concerts. I am a superfan of Taylor Swift, George Strait…and Ted Lasso, of course.
Thanks for joining this community-we’ve got a lot of work to do!
Jenn
