Josephine Jackisch is a social epidemiologist working as a Postdoc in the Population Health Laboratory of the University of Fribourg. She holds a Bachelor and a Master degree in Public Health Sciences from Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Linköping University (Sweden) and a Master in Social Sciences from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France). She has previously worked at the Charité-University Hospital Berlin as Coordinator of the Academic Office of the World Health Summit and in the WHO Regional office for Europe in the field of health policy for prevention of noncommunicable diseases and healthy ageing across the life course, with a particular interest within healthy and age-friendly cities and their attempts to increase health equity.

Josephine completed her PhD at the Centre for Health Equity Studies (Karolinska Institutet/ Stockholm University) in Sweden researching the role of childhood adversity for premature mortality and health inequalities. Josephine’s research takes a life course approach to explore how we can better understand health inequalities. She is particularly interested in disentangling the mechanisms that drive the reproduction of disadvantage among the most vulnerable groups and contribute to the accumulation of disadvantage across life. Her current research uses causal inference techniques to investigate how social environmental factors and family linkages affect health outcomes across the life course. This work is part of a project focusing on the effects of early life social and lifestyle risk factors on biological functioning to prioritize prevention strategies for chronic diseases funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. More information on this grant can be found here.

Social epidemiology, role of family for health inequalities, life course epidemiology, early life social determinants, longitudinal cohort studies

ORCID: 0000-0002-5958-2303