Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC)
An OsloMet Centre of Research Excellence studying the societal aspects of pandemics
On November 6th, Dr. Adolfo García-Sastre (Mount Sinai, New York) will be giving a lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters as a guest at Centre for Research on Pandemics
& Society (PANSOC) at OsloMet.
Would you like to participate? Please use this link to register: https://nettskjema.no/a/pansoc6nov
Nita Bharti, Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University (Nita Bharti | The Huck Institutes (en-US) (psu.edu), will visit us from August 14th to September 8th.
Nita Bharti’s research focuses on the impact of human movement and behavior on the spread and prevention of infectious diseases. She is particularly interested in the social and environmental factors that increase vulnerability and health inequities around infectious processes. During her time at PANSOC, she will be working to understand the root causes of health inequities in respiratory viruses. She will also be exploring biases and gaps in surveillance data, which obscure health inequities and delay their detection.”
The Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC) invites applications for our Fall 2024 Visiting Researcher program. Preference will be given to researchers with potential for obtaining external funding, including Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship applicants.
One applicant will be selected based on their research experience and interests. We expect that the Visiting Researcher will contribute concrete ideas for – and at least initial drafting of – a funding proposal during their stay in fall 2024 (minimum 2 weeks, preferably up to 4 weeks). These proposals will be led by the Visiting Researcher with PANSOC as a partner and submitted to local funding bodies corresponding to the researchers’ affiliations/countries or to the Research Council of Norway or NordForsk with us as PI, as appropriate.
We encourage applications from researchers in all fields with interests in the social, economic, and biological aspects of historical, current, and future pandemics. We are particularly interested in topics such as:
The Visiting Researcher program will cover transportation costs to Oslo and accommodation up to 50,000 NOK.
To apply, please send 1) a CV, 2) a description (1-2 pages) of your idea for a joint proposal, 3) tentative budget for the visit, and 4) anticipated timing or availability for travel to Oslo to Svenn-Erik Mamelund (masv@oslomet.no).
APPLICATION DEADLINE: 5 July 2024
While in Norway, Gerardo Chowell, Prof. at Georgia State University (left in the photo), will be conducting a comprehensive analysis of shifts in income-based poverty within Chile at the comuna level, the most precise administrative division in the country. This investigation focuses on the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. He leverages data from a national socio-economic characterization survey carried out in 2017, 2020, and 2022 to accomplish this. This rich dataset provides a detailed view of socio-economic changes over time.
Following this analysis, our research team plans to quantify excess mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. This subsequent study will examine mortality variations across different levels of poverty while also accounting for age group differences, thereby offering insights into the pandemic’s unequal impacts on various socio-demographic groups.
Merle Eisenberg will be visiting PANSOC between 16th of May and 5th of June. He is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University. He is a historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages and a historian of disease, pandemics, and the environment.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic is supposedly an outlier compared to most historical pandemics because minority groups may have died at a lower rate in some locations.
In Eisenberg’s own words, “my goal at PANSOC is to work with the world leading experts on the 1918 Influenza and its impact based on race and socio-economic status to understand if and where this was the case and why. To investigate this potentially unique outcome, I have been co-running a project at Oklahoma State University entitled “Looking back and moving forward: Designing for disease mitigation among Black American Communities.” It has gathered data on the neighborhood level impact of the 1918 Influenza on the largest cities in Oklahoma to understand the impact of disease on Black and Indigenous communities. We have death records of almost 700 individuals geolocated to geographical locations, which given that Oklahoma was a racially segregated state in 1918, we can use to map deaths based on race to understand differential mortalities. At PANSOC, I will be expanding my work on the impact of pandemics in Oklahoma as a case study to understand the disparate impact of disease based on race and socio-economic status”.
Bio
Merle Eisenberg has co-authored the 2023 book Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies, which discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture. Diseased Cinema analyzes how American movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives during the past century.
He has several other disease projects underway. The first, “Pandemics and History: the Plague Concept, Disease, and the End of Antiquity,” tracks the development of the Justinianic Plague. It analyzes the plague’s differential impact based on local conditions and investigates how a plague pandemic as a catastrophic myth was created along with its continuing use to the present day, including during Covid. The second with colleagues at Oklahoma State University, “Using socioeconomic, behavioral and environmental data to understand disease dynamics: exploring COVID-19 outcomes in Oklahoma,” received a 3 year National Science Foundation Grant for 2024-2026. As part of this project, he is investigating the impact of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on populations in Oklahoma to understand the comparative impact of disease on minority populations.
He has also published articles on a variety of topics and disciplinary journals including the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Medieval Europe, Journal of Late Antiquity, and Speculum (forthcoming). He hosts the podcast Infectious Historians on the history of disease, pandemics and medicine, which has run for over 4 years and has now released over 120 episodes.
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.
Laureen Steele is PhD candidate at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
Her PhD thesis is looking at how host factors impacted disease severity during historical influenza pandemics, to inform on future pandemic preparedness. Steele is interested in host factors such as age, BMI, indigeneity, and prior infection history.
In the Fall of 2022, Steele was invited to join the project Social Science Meets Biology | CAS (cas-nor.no) at CAS (Centre for Advanced Study) in Oslo for several months to work on a paper describing the effect of measles on 1918 influenza outcomes in soldiers who fought in WW1.
This Fall, Steele has been invited back to Oslo to collaborate with researchers at PANSOC looking at age patterns of mortality during the influenza pandemics of the 20th Century.
Evi Juuti has been visiting PANSOC for two weeks in August.
Eevi Juuti is an architect, urban planner and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu specializing in the use of service design and design thinking in the context of built environment. She has also been working with topics concerning environmental health. Now she is working with RECIPE (Resistant Cities. Urban Planning as Means for Pandemic Prevention) project, which explores the relationship between built environments and pandemics.
Evi hold a talk at our webinar while here. You can read more about Evi and her projects here: First Fall 2023 Webinar: Built Environments and Pandemics – Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC) (oslomet.no) and also watch the recordings of her webinar talk here: Webinar Recording: Built Environments and Pandemics – Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC) (oslomet.no)
Dr. Bennett is our second PANSOC visiting scholar this semester. Bennett is at the Population Health Sciences Institute, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University.
Dr. Bennett is presenting two times this week at the Centre for Advanced study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The first presentation is titled “Geographical inequalities in COVID-19 vaccination and mortality” and the second is a workshop on Structural Equation Modelling.
PANSOC welcomes applications for our Visiting Researcher program during the 2023-2024 academic year. Preference will be given to senior researchers with demonstrated potential for obtaining external funding.
Two applicants will be selected based on their research experience and interests and the requirement that they contribute concrete ideas for – and at least initial drafting of – grant proposals during their stay (minimum 2 weeks, preferably up to 4 weeks). These proposals will be led by the candidates with PANSOC as a partner and submitted to local funding bodies corresponding to the researchers’ affiliations/countries or to the Research Council of Norway or NordForsk with us as PI, as appropriate.
We encourage applications from researchers in all fields with interests in the social and biological aspects of historical, current, and future pandemics. We are particularly interested in topics such as:
The visiting researcher program will cover transportation costs to Oslo and accommodations up to 50,000 NOK.
Please send 1) a CV, 2) a description (1-2 pages) of your idea for a joint proposal, 3) tentative budget for the visit, and 4) anticipated timing or availability for travel to Oslo to Svenn-Erik Mamelund (masv@oslomet.no).
APPLICATION DEADLINE: 15 June 2023
