An OsloMet Centre of Research Excellence studying the societal aspects of pandemics
Tidlig i karrieren hadde senterleder Mamelund en tung spøkelsesperiode med få artikler publisert. Det kunne ha ført til tidlig exit i akademia, men heldigvis gikk det ikke slik. Les kronikken her: Mine spøkelsesår i akademia
For the seventh Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Abigail Dumes (University of Michigan). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 19 March at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk:
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated 400 million people worldwide have had Long COVID, a term that describes a range of often disabling symptoms that persist for at least three months after the acute phase of COVID-19 (Al-Aly et al. 2024). In the US alone, federal survey data reveal that around 5.3 percent of all US adults—or 13.7 million people—are “currently experiencing Long COVID” (National Center for Health Statistics 2024). Due to its potential to significantly disrupt activities of daily living, Long COVID can qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and emerging research has shown that Long COVID disproportionately affects individuals with preexisting disabilities (Cohen and Rodgers 2024). Survey data suggests that there is a correlation between Long COVID and “increased odds of work loss” (Venkatesh et al. 2024), but much less is known about the lived experience of Long COVID and disability in the context of work, particularly among higher education employees. In this paper, I discuss early qualitative data from a multiphase, multidisciplinary mixed methods project focused on University of Michigan-Ann Arbor faculty and staff with Long COVID to begin to shed light on the relationship between Long COVID, work, and disability and to map out a future for more equitable workplace accommodations.
About the speaker:
Abigail Dumes is a medical and cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan whose research explores the intersectional dimensions of complex chronic conditions. Her first book, Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine, was published by Duke University Press in 2020, and she is currently conducting research on Long COVID, work, and disability among University of Michigan-Ann Arbor faculty and staff.
For the sixth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Nathaniel Darling (University of Cambridge). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 12 March at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk:
This talk presents work conducted jointly with Henrik Salje. The 1918 influenza pandemic was marked by unusually high mortality among young adults. The immune-imprinting hypothesis explains this pattern as a cohort effect arising from antigenic mismatch: individuals first exposed in childhood to influenza strains dissimilar to the 1918 virus were less protected and therefore experienced higher mortality. We test this hypothesis by examining age-specific mortality patterns across the pandemics of 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. Using long-run, cause- and age-specific mortality data for a panel of countries, we estimate excess mortality for each age group and each pandemic year within a consistent framework, and reconstruct cohort-level measures of antigenic mismatch based on historical circulation. Initial results suggest that imprinting mismatch captures important elements of the observed age patterns, yet the fit remains incomplete, pointing to additional mechanisms beyond imprinting that shaped pandemic mortality.
About the speaker:
Nathaniel Darling is a PhD student based in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP). His research seeks to model the infectious disease dynamics shaping historical mortality patterns.
For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Won-tak Joo (University of Florida). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 26 February at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk:
Previous studies have documented the health and socioeconomic disadvantages associated with in-utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Utilizing mortality records from Social Security Numident data, which cover nearly all deaths in the United States between 1988 and 2005, this study estimates the effects of in-utero pandemic exposure on old-age mortality. Baseline results indicate a longevity reduction of 0.2 years among males born in 1919 compared to those born between 1915-1918 or 1920-1922. However, when restricting the sample to individuals born in 1919 or earlier and incorporating sibling fixed effects, the longevity disadvantage is more pronounced for females (ß = -2.3, p < 0.01) than for males (ß = -1.4, p < 0.1). The effects of in-utero exposure, weighted by city-level influenza intensity, reveal similar patterns. I assess the robustness of these findings using data from crowd-sourced genealogy datasets, which include mortality records from young to old ages, and discuss potential mechanisms that may explain the long-term mortality consequences of the pandemic.
About the speaker:
Won-tak Joo is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Florida. His interests are in social demography, social networks, and computational sociology. His current projects explore (1) socioeconomic differences in social network changes during later-life transitions (e.g., disease diagnosis, retirement), and (2) the individual and family consequences of epidemics using large genealogy and census datasets.
I nysgjerrighetsdrevet forskning gir ikke nødvendigvis mangfold i forskergruppen økt kvalitet, selv om mangfold kan være politisk ønsket, skriver senterleder Mamelelund i en ny kronikk i Forskerforum. Les kronikken her: Mangfold i seg selv flytter ikke forskningsfronten
The National Archives of Norway, Statistics Norway, Institute of Public Health, Norwegian Computing Center, Norwegian Arctic University and National Library of Norway are building a historic population register covering the population of Norway 1800 to present.
On Monday 9th February, Lars Holden, Dr. philos, Research director at Norwegian Computing Center (http://www.nr.no/en/homepage/holden), gave a guest lecture on the possibilities for using the Norwegian Historical Population Register in our research.
The Norwegian Historical Population Register consists of:
· An authoritative register of deceased persons in open sources available at HBR – Forside The register gives each person a unique ID that we encourage to be used in all texts, presentations and exhibitions as documentation.
· Research data is currently available for the deceased part of the population at the email address histreg.no or Lars.Holden@nr.no.
· The closed register extends the National Population Register and is linked to all modern register data. We expect research data will be available during 2027.
For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Lone Simonsen (PandemiX Center). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 12 February at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk:
When a new pandemic virus emerges in a naive population, the only control options are nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) until vaccines or effective treatments become available. Here, we report on the Danish suppression strategy and use of a combination of NPIs with a notable absence of extremely strict measures (such as stay-at-home orders). Only 7% of Danes were infected (serological evidence) in the first year of the pandemic, compared with 50% in Lombardy in the first wave alone. This low attack rate was accomplished by initial rapid intervention with a free-of-charge mass testing program beginning in October 2020, a strong digital data infrastructure, timely contact tracing and voluntary home isolation, real-time reporting of surveillance data, and a high degree of public trust. The individual contribution of each NPI to the pandemic control is difficult to assess; yet, evidence points to the mass testing program as being particularly effective in removing infected individuals from the pool. In January 2021, vaccines became available, and 96% of Danes over 50 years of age were vaccinated twice with an mRNA vaccine by summer. On February 1, 2022, while facing the Omicron variant and with the older adult newly boosted, Denmark became the first country to drop all NPIs. A few months later, 70% of the population had been infected with the Omicron variant, showing the SARS-CoV-2 transmission potential when unmitigated. Denmark was only close to intensive care unit capacity during the second wave in winter 2020-2021, when 5% of the population was infected. In conclusion, the effectiveness of the combined NPIs is evident due to the low ( < 10%) attack rate in the first two waves before vaccines became available, far from the experience of unmitigated COVID-19 in Lombardy in spring 2020, with a 50% attack rate and catastrophic levels of severe morbidity and mortality.
You can read the full paper here: A disease suppression strategy in action: The impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark – ScienceDirect
About the speaker:
Lone Simonsen is a Professor of Population Health Sciences, at the Department of Science and Environment at Roskilde University. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and involves colleagues and methodologies from fields ranging from history to mathematics. Over the past 25 years she has worked internationally as an epidemiologist and researcher. She is the center leader of PandemiX Center of Excellence (Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Pandemic Signatures), supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF).
Centre leader Mamelund has been awarded a NordIAS Visiting Fellowship from the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo (CAS) to visit Tampere Institute for Advanced Study for three weeks in April. This visit will enhance rare academic collaboration and dialogue across Norway and Finland in the fields of mathematical pandemiology (Mamelund, Chowell, Gaddy, Raitoharju) and economic and social history of war (Peltola, Saaritsa, Gaddy, Taskinen).
The aim of the “Scarred people” project is to model excess all-cause spatial mortality in Tampere due to scarring events like the like typhoid epidemics in 1916, the Finnish civil war in 1918, Spanish flu in 1918-20, and unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1920s, using Serfling models and GIS.
The context of a civil war and pandemic in 1918 is especially interesting as it makes us able to tease out interactions of disease, crowding in prison camps, executions, and undernourishment. At the peak, there were almost 10 000 POWs at the camp in Tampere, compared to a normal city population of 45 000. Past scholars of the Spanish flu have hypothesized about the impacts of malnutrition on mortality during the pandemic, but malnutrition in 1918 generally happened in contexts in which high-quality data is not available. Using our collective expertise in disease modelling and the context of the Finnish civil war to study the experience of the pandemic in the POW camp will lead to a better understanding of the pandemic globally.
Our Finish partners have 1) individual cause-specific mortality data (650-800 deaths/year) with the possibility to link deaths to population and red guard membership data, as well as occupation, address, age, gender, and time at the prison camp; 2) weekly statistics of morbidity with causes in the city (in Finland, the city doctors had to report every case to the city health board); and 3) individual hospitalization records for the 1918-21 period from both the city hospitals (City archive) and the hospital in the prison camp (National archive). These latter data have not been collected yet, but we will discuss how to photograph and transcribe this data during the visit.
Expected contributions to Tampere IAS include 1) a workshop to set up data and discuss emerging findings; 2) Guest lectures by Mamelund at Tampere IAS and the Universities of Tampere and Helsinki; 3) Half day academic presentations for larger audience at Tampere; 4) Active participations in academic and social activities at the Tampere IAS, and Tampere and Helsinki universities; 5) Mentoring of students, including a Master student (Antti Puska) who is studying the Spanish flu in Tampere, 1918-1921; 6) An evaluation of the visit and the outcome of the visit to CAS Oslo; 7) Draft of at least one scientific journal article; 8) Collaborations on proposals for new research funding.
Collaborators at Tampere IAS and Tampere University:
1. Ilari Taskinen (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tampere University & previously at Tampere IAS 2023-25)
2. Emma Raitoharju (University Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine & Health Technology, Tampere University)
Collaborators at University of Helsinki:
3. Jarmo Peltola (Senior Research Fellow, Economic and Social History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland)
4. Sakari Saaritsa (Professor of Social History, Director, Master’s Programme in Society and Change, Economic and and Social History, Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki, Finland)
Affiliated collaborators:
6. Gerardo Chowell (Georgia State University).
7 Hampton Gaddy (LSE).
Vitalie Ștîrba will be visiting PANSOC from 9 February to 13 March.
Ștîrba is a demographer and a PhD student in the Department of Demography and Geodemography at Charles University in Prague, where he study avoidable cancer mortality in European countries. His doctoral research focuses on the effects of cancer mortality on life expectancy dynamics, trends in leading preventable and treatable cancer sites, lung cancer mortality and tobacco control policies, and the role of multimorbidity in mortality trends among cancer patients.
Ștîrba has a bachelor’s degree in Geography, a master’s degree in Demography, and a master’s degree in Public Administration; His dissertations focused on population censuses, internal migration, and avoidable mortality. In recent years, Ștîrba has participated in several projects related to population forecasting, historical demography, and regional development in Moldova.
At PANSOC, Ștîrba is interested in collaborating with local researchers to exchange experiences, particularly by exploring how historical events shape the health of yearly cohorts, and learning new techniques in demographic analysis.
For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Ulrik Hvid (PandemiX Center and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 5 February at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Blurb:
Over the summer of 2022, an outbreak of clade IIb mpox swept the globe, but then seemed to fade as quickly as it had arrived. The disease was heavily concentrated among men who have sex with men and had a high comorbidity with HIV, indicating risky sexual behavior. What happened? Did the risk-group get immunized? Did the fear of infection lead risk groups into abstinence? Did the smallpox vaccine save us?
You can read the full paper here: Relationship dynamics and behavioral adaptations in the control of the 2022 mpox epidemic | PNAS
Bio:
Ulrik Hvid is a PhD student at the PandemiX Center and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Trained in biophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute, he uses the methods of network science and complexity theory to understand the dynamics of disease spread.
