Month: March 2026

For the eight Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Hamed Karami (Georgia State University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 2 April 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:

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted health systems worldwide, with important consequences beyond direct COVID-19 deaths. In this talk, I examine how these disruptions affected tuberculosis (TB) outcomes, leading to excess burden and widening inequalities. Using data-driven modeling approaches, I highlight global patterns as well as uneven impacts within the United States, with a focus on structural vulnerabilities and lessons for building more resilient TB control systems.

About the speaker:

Hamed Karami is a PhD student in Mathematics and an MS student in Applied Statistics at Georgia State University. He holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Iran University of Science and Technology, as well as undergraduate and master’s degrees in applied and pure mathematics from Shahed University and Sharif University of Technology, respectively. His research focuses on mathematical and statistical modeling of infectious diseases, including control problems, network-based models, and statistical approaches.

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.