Category: Pandemics & Society Seminars

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.

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).

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.

For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Lieke Fleur Heupink (Akershus University Hospital). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 29th January 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 significantly disrupted healthcare delivery globally, forcing hospital administrators to make difficult ad hoc decisions about postponing or cancelling elective care to ensure adequate capacity for COVID-19 patients. This resulted in missed care and increased waiting times for health services across many countries. While various data-driven models were developed during the pandemic to assist decision makers, most focussed on transmission dynamics and the potential effects from infection prevention and control measures. Although these models provided valuable insight into slowing the spread of disease – buying hospitals more time to prepare – they were not tailored to the unique contexts of individual hospitals. Leveraging facility-level data presents unique opportunities to provide hospital-specific predictions that administrators need for operational planning. This locally gathered hospital data can be used to build analytical models accounting for the diversity within their catchment areas. However, smaller sample sizes at the local level may introduce methodological challenges. Using COVID-19 data from a Norwegian hospital as case study, this research explores how hospital-level data can be utilized to develop tools that provide timely and actionable information to decision makers at individual hospitals, ultimately enhancing their preparedness during future pandemics.

About the Speaker

Lieke Fleur Heupink is a PhD researcher at the Health Service Research Department at Akershus University Hospital and the University of Oslo. She applies epidemiological and health economics methods to analyse COVID-19 data with the aim to strengthen hospital preparedness and response.

For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Sanjay Gyawali (Akershus University Hospital). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 22th January at the normal time (1600 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 revealed significant gaps in global preparedness. As we navigate the recovery phase, the risk of future pandemics remains one of the most pressing challenges to global safety. During the pandemic, a wide range of control measures were implemented worldwide, often with limited evidence of their effectiveness. In the project “Lessons from pandemic”, we investigate the effectiveness and impact of these measures—the key strategies employed by governments in response to the pandemic—from multiple perspectives through a comprehensive analysis of various sources of COVID-19 data from different regions in Norway. Our objective is to identify optimal strategies that mitigate health risks and minimize unnecessary social and economic burdens. Ultimately, we aim to transform the insights gained from the COVID-19 experience into actionable strategies that strengthen preparedness for future health crises. In my talk, I will present preliminary findings from this ongoing project.

About the Speaker

Sanjay Gyawali is a PhD candidate at the Health Services Research Unit (HØKH), Akershus University Hospital. Gyawali  has a background in epidemiology and has a Master of Philosophy (MPhil)  in Global Health from the University of Bergen. He is currently working on a project to prepare for the next pandemic. 

For the ninth and final Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Mallika Snyder (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 11th December at the normal time (1600 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: Millions of people have lost a relative to COVID-19, with many of these individuals likely to be alive well into this century. How might this population influence how the COVID-19 pandemic is remembered, and how may this shape policy and popular responses to future crises? This talk presents ongoing research using demographic microsimulation to predict the extent and trajectory of what we term “kinship memory” – the share of a population bereaved by a mortality crisis – in the context of COVID-19 in 120 countries around the world from 2025 to 2100. Our findings show that the continued survival of a large proportion of grandchildren will contribute to greater stability of kinship memory, with around 1 percent of the 2100 population of most regions related to a victim. However, the extent of this stability is limited by the relatively older age structure of COVID-19 excess mortality, which shapes the predicted ages of bereaved kin and the extent of their projected survival. Our work highlights the role of demographic structure of both the group of bereaved relatives and the overall population in shaping the projected kinship memory of a crisis.

Bio: Mallika Snyder is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. Her research focuses on measuring the demographic impact of crisis-related population change in limited-data settings, and better understanding its implications for affected populations and individuals. Drawing on computational demographic methods and non-traditional data sources, her recent work has explored topics including the effects of COVID-19 excess mortality on kinship networks, as well as the development of innovative methods to better integrate information on crisis-related mobility into subnational population projections used to inform United Nations humanitarian action. A graduate of the UC Berkeley PhD program in Demography and the MA in Statistics, she recently joined MPIDR from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), where she worked as an applied demographer focused on population data and estimation in humanitarian settings.

For the eighth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Sheilagh Ogilvie (All Souls College, University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20th November at the normal time (1600 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: How do societies use institutions – the humanly devised rules of social interaction – to tackle epidemic disease? Controlling Contagion (Princeton University Press, 2025) uses evidence from seven centuries of pandemics to show how societies tackled externalities – situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others in addition to those that I myself incur. It explores how markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families dealt with the negative externalities of contagion; the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunisation; and the cross-border externalities of quarantine, vaccine diplomacy, and river agreements. It shows how, long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated to deal with biological shocks.

Biography: Sheilagh Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She explores the lives of ordinary people in the past and tries to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. She is interested in how social institutions shaped economic development since the Middle Ages. She has recently launched a research project on “Serfdom and Economic Development, c. 1000-1861”.