Professor Kjetil A. van der Wel, project leader
Kjetil van der Wel is a professor in social policy and does his research within comparative health inequality, employment and living conditions research. The focus of his work has been to evaluate the role of welfare policies in distributing participatory resources and shaping people’s opportunities and motivations. He is an experienced analyst of quantitative data, both longitudinal and comparative, including register data since 2003.

Professor Espen Dahl
Espen Dahl has conducted research on health inequalities since 1987. Over the past decade he has combined health inequality research with comparative welfare state research. He started using Norwegian register data in the early 1980s in a project on long-term sick leave. Since then he has lead and participated in a number of projects that are based on register data. He has also conducted research on social assistance dynamics and active labour market policies. Dahl recently led the Norwegian review of health inequalities in Norway, which was commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate of Health.

Research professor Jon Ivar Elstad
Graduated in sociology, worked in social research since 1981, PhD in 2000. Main research areas: Social inequalities in health, theories of class, children’s level of living, the impact of The Great Recession on population health and access to health care in Europe, health care utilization among migrants, the role of genetics in social research, the impact of family income on school results, etc.

Senior Researcher Kristian Heggebø
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Associate professor Åsmund Hermansen
Åsmund Hermansen holds a PhD in social work and social policy and works as an Associate Professor at OsloMet. His research interests includes topics related to an inclusive work life, active ageing, retirement and the effect of measures to retain older workers.

PhD Student Maria Reinholdt Jensen
Åsmund Hermansen holds a PhD in social work and social policy and works as an Associate Professor at OsloMet. His research interests includes topics related to an inclusive work life, active ageing, retirement and the effect of measures to retain older workers.

The Swedish team is located at the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University. They have extensive experience of register-based research on the social determinants of health, both in Sweden and in European collaborative projects. The Swedish team have backgrounds in sociology, public health, political science, and statistics.

Professor Olle Lundberg, team leader
Olle Lundberg is Professor of Health Equity Studies. His main research interests have included welfare research, health inequalities and social determinants of health. His publications cover topics such as the size and trends of health inequalities in Sweden and internationally; welfare trends in Sweden during the crisis in the 1990s; income, relative deprivation and health; the importance of childhood conditions for adult health; Sense of Coherence and its connection to health; and health among older adults.

Senior Lecturer Olof Östergren
Olof Östergren researches the educational gradient in mortality, focusing on structural, individual, and behavioral factors, examined through register data. He has also worked in European projects on comparative studies on social inequalities in health. He has a background in sociology, statistics and public health.

Researcher Ingrid Esser
Ingrid’s research centers around the sociology of work, work values, job preferences, job quality, matching in the labour market, health, well-being.
Her reserach is predominantly internationally comparative, assessing the importance of both individual, work-place and societal factors on attitudes and behaviour. Particular interest is with addressing both institutions of social policy and the labour organisation. Research is empirically and quantitatively oriented.

Researcher Johan Rehnberg
Johan Rehnberg is a researcher at the Aging Research Center, which is a collaboration between Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University. He has a PhD in Public Health from Stockholm Universtity, and a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology. Johan’s research interests are health inequalities among older persons and during his PhD he investigated income inequalities in mortality in the Swedish aging population.

The Danish team has health expertise and a focus on early life. The Danish team, are specialised in social epidemiology, early life epidemiology and life-course epidemiology. The team has extensive experience with register data, including cross-countries register-based social and health inequality Research.

Professor Anne-Marie Nybo Andersen, team leader
Anne-Marie is a professor of social epidemiology and explores how exposures during the earliest phases of life affect child health, using cohort data and national register data.

Postdoctoral student Stine Kjær Urhøj
Stine’s primary research focus is on perinatal and pediatric epidemiology and epidemiological methods and she is particularly interested in how conditions during pregnancy and early life influence the health of the child and the mother. Her doctoral thesis examines the relationship between the father’s age at conception and the health of the offspring. The project is a population-based register study using Danish nation-wide registers as well as data from birth cohorts from Denmark and Norway.

Associate professor Henrik Brønnum-Hansen
Henrik has studied the epidemiology of multiple sclerosis and cardiovascular diseases on the basis of registers, and been engaged in risk factor epidemiology, research on social inequality, life and health expectancy, public health modelling, and quantitative health impact assessment. Henrik has for many years director of the programme for register-based research on selected diseases and health problems at the National Institute of Public Health in Denmark until the closing down of the programme in April 2011.

Professor Pekka Martikainen, team leader
Current research interests include changes and causes of socioeconomic differences in cause-specific mortality, and various issues relating to ageing populations. He is also working on the health effects of marital status and living arrangements, as well as the competing effects of characteristics of areas and characteristics of individuals on mortality, and has been involved in cross-national comparisons of health inequalities.

Researcher Lasse Tarkiainen
Research interests include the origins of the association between income and mortality and the explanations of changes in the mortality of income groups over time in Finland. He has also been studying the areal differentials in mortality in urban contexts.

Researcher Heta Moustgaard
Heta Moustgaard has studied the consequences of mental health problems in adulthood as well as familial clustering and intergenerational transmission of mental health problems. She has strong experience in using longitudinal register-based family data and advanced statistical methods.