Jennifer Dowd Beam

Full Professor

Jennifer Beam Dowd, PhD, is Professor of Demography and Population Health and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. She studies the social and biological determinants of health and longevity, including stress and immune function, links between infectious and chronic disease, obesity, and the human microbiome. She currently leads a five-year European Research Council project examining why life expectancy is stalling in some countries like the US and UK. She has published over 120 scholarly articles in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and the American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Dowd holds a PhD in Demography and Economics from Princeton University and completed postdoctoral training in Epidemiology as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan.
During the pandemic, Dr. Dowd researched the mortality impact of COVID-19 and helped launch Dear Pandemic (now Those Nerdy Girls), a science communication platform that reached millions with practical, evidence-based information. For this work she was honored with the O2RB Excellence in Impact Award from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the Ida B. Wells Public Engagement Award from the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Science. That experience deepened her commitment to science communication and making health data more accessible. She now writes the Substack newsletter Data for Health, where she demystifies the science and statistics behind healthy aging, longevity, demography and more.