Session 2: Young Adults
Childhood adversities such as poverty, parental separation, and parental illness are linked to lifelong social disadvantage and poor health. Mental health problems play a key role in perpetuating this cycle, especially during the stressful transition to young adulthood, which involves major life changes such as entering the workforce. This talk explores the early origins and intergenerational transmission of mental health issues during this critical life phase.
Naja Hulvej Rod is a professor of epidemiology and director of the Copenhagen Health Complexity Center at the University of Copenhagen. Her expertise spans various fields, including sleep, health inequality, young adult health, and early-life adversity, with a focus on health complexity, causal inference, and life course mechanisms. She has a particular interest in complex systems theory and how it intersects with methodological insights from causal inference theory. She has extensive expertise in working with longitudinal datasets and register-based research. Naja Hulvej Rod is the principal investigator (PI) of the Danish Life Course Cohort (DANLIFE) Study, which utilizes multidimensional data covering the full range of measured lifetime exposures across multiple social, environmental, and biological dimensions in 2 million people. She is a member and former Chair of the Council for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. She has served on numerous boards and committees across Europe and has been awarded several prestigious grants and awards, including the Elite Researcher Prize 2022 and an ERC Consolidator Grant.
