Biography

Naja Hulvej Rod is Professor of Epidemiology at University of Copenhagen. Her research deals with large public health challenges including sleep, health inequality, young adult health, and early life adversity and it is focused on causal inference, complexity, and life course mechanisms. She is leading the interdisciplinary Complexity and Big Data Group, which aims at studying the social and biological factors determining health and disease across the life span. She has a particular interest in causal inference theory and how it intersects with methodological insights from complex systems theory. She has extensive expertise in working with longitudinal datasets, register-based research and complex modelling including social influences and group dynamics. To embrace complexity in epidemiology, she actively explores new sources (e.g., smartphone tracking) of ‘big data’, incorporate systems thinking and leverage insights across disciplines, and she has been involved in several citizen science projects with a direct societal engagement and impact. Naja Hulvej Rod is PI of the Danish Life Course Cohort (DANLIFE) Study, which leverage multi-dimensional exposome data covering the totality of measured lifetime exposures across multiple social, environmental, and biological dimensions. She is Chair of Council on Health and Disease Prevention (Vidensråd for Forebyggelse), and she has participated in numerous boards and committees across Europe, including the Swedish Research Council, the Finnish Research Council, and the French Health Data Hub. She was awarded the Elite Researcher Prize 2022, one of the highest academic honours in Denmark.