Please meet Elisabeth Wrigley-Field, a PANSOC Visiting Research Program Scholar 2023-24
The PANSOC visiting researcher program for the academic year 2023-24 have selected two researchers. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field | Minnesota Population Center (umn.edu) and Merle Eisenberg | Oklahoma State University (okstate.edu).
While Merle Eisenberg is joining us in May 2024, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has been visiting PANSOC for the past few weeks and is staying a total of one month this fall. Wrigley-Field is a mortality demographer who studies social stratification in United States mortality in two contexts where infectious disease risk changed radically: the early twentieth century, when disease risk was falling but was punctuated by the terribly destructive 1918 flu pandemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic as it has evolved over the past several years.
Here at OsloMet, she is working with PANSOC researchers to develop new strategies to unravel an old puzzle: why did mortality to many other respiratory diseases, especially tuberculosis, fall so dramatically after the 1918 flu? Wrigley-Field is using her skills in social history and mathematical modeling to identify new empirical and modeling tests of the leading hypotheses, and is benefitting from the broad interdisciplinary discussions at PANSOC: its webinar series, journal club, and regular brainstorming sessions with pandemic researchers from across the social and biological sciences.
While here, she was awarded the Milbank Quarterly Early Career Award in Population Health from the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science in the United States.