September 12, 2024 | News

Congratulations Anastasia Lam!

On September 6, 2024, Anastasia Lam successfully defended her thesis "Growing old with multimorbidity: how our differences shape the years we live with disease" at the University of St Andrews, passing the viva without any corrections. Her thesis consisted of four papers, two of which have already been published in high-impact population and health journals, and a further two papers under review. The examining committee,consisting of Professor Jennifer Dowd, University of Oxford, and Dr. Tania Mendo, and Professor Nissa Finney (convenor), praised the high quality of the work and the innovative approach to measuring multimorbidity, combining demographic and epidemiological approaches.

In her thesis, Anastasia examined population inequalities in multimorbid life expectancy and disease accumulation in five countries with different patterns of development and aging. Using advanced demographic methods and sociological theory to analyze the impact of macro- and micro-level factors on these inequalities, she finds evidence of intersectional inequalities in multimorbid life expectancy across race, education, and gender in South Africa, and significant disparities in working life expectancy at older ages in South Korea. In addition, her thesis identifies significant disparities in disability-free and disabling multimorbid life expectancy within and between Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, as well as an increasing prevalence of disease accumulation among younger birth cohorts in South Korea. The results of Anastasia's dissertation highlight the importance of targeting specific social groups in policies aimed at reducing social, structural, and health inequalities. Her research suggests that incorporating aging profiles into health expectancy estimates and examining the relationships between work, family, social security, education, and health systems are valuable areas for future research and policy.

Anastasia Lam was part of the St Andrews-Max Planck PhD studentship and was part of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS). Her thesis was supervised by Katherine Keenan and Hill Kulu from the University of St. Andrews and Mikko Myrskylä from the MPIDR.

Anastasia has been working in the Population Health Laboratory at the MPIDR and will start a new postdoctoral position with Philipp Lersch at the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Einstein Center Population Diversity. There she will work broadly on family diversity and health and economic inequalities in old age, with a focus on health expectancy and post-retirement work and health in a comparative global perspective.