October 04, 2019 | News
Doctorate received
Karen van Hedel (in the middle) and her paranymphs. © Frank van der Panne Fotografie
On October 2, 2019 Karen van Hedel from the Laboratory of Population Health successfully defended her doctoral thesis "Explaining the US Health Disadvantage: The role of social inequalities" at the Erasmus Medical Center of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The aim of her thesis was to gain insight into the role of social inequalities by explaining the differences in health between the United States and Western Europe. She focused on social inequalities by education, work, and family factors. Her thesis demonstrated that larger educational inequalities in health related topics in the US than in Europe contribute to the explanation of the US health disadvantage.
However, the distribution of mortality risks associated with marital status, labor force activity, and work-family trajectories for Americans and Europeans did not contribute to the explanation of the US health disadvantage.
The dissertation was supervised by F.J van Lenthe (Erasmus MC), J.P. Mackenbach (Erasmus MC) and Mauricio Avendano (King's College).