Anna Thalén is a doctoral student who has been affiliated with CHESS since 2022. She is pursuing her doctoral research within the ORCHID and CANDIS research projects.
Q: What is your academic background, and what led you to pursue a PhD?
I started with a bachelor’s degree in organizational psychology, but quickly became interested in the broader social and structural factors that shape health and wellbeing. That interest led me to pursue a Master’s in Public Health at Stockholm University. After graduating, I worked as a research assistant at the Department of Public Health Sciences, where I was introduced to academic research. I found that I especially enjoyed working with quantitative methods and register-based data, and I became interested in how these methods could be better used to understand and highlight unequal health outcomes. When I came across the opportunity to apply for a PhD focusing on disability and health inequalities, it felt like a natural and meaningful continuation of that path.
Q. Your doctoral work broadly focuses on disability-related health inequalities. What motivated your interest in this topic?
People with disabilities represent a substantial share of the population, yet they have received comparatively little attention in public health research and statistics. This is particularly striking given the persistent inequalities in health outcomes between people with and without disabilities, as well as the wide-ranging disadvantages this group faces across social conditions and in everyday life. My interest is driven by the combination of these clear inequalities and the challenges posed by limited data. Globally, data on disability is scarce, and without better data these inequalities are difficult to fully understand and address. I am motivated by the opportunity to contribute knowledge that can hopefully make a difference for a group that has too often been overlooked in public health and health inequality research.
Q. What are some of the key questions that your research is addressing?
My PhD thesis focuses on disability-related inequalities in mortality. People with disabilities are known to have substantially lower life expectancy and higher mortality rates, yet this remains an understudied area relative to the scale of the problem. What makes this particularly important is that emerging evidence suggests many of these inequalities are linked to modifiable factors that can be targeted through policy interventions. The studies in my dissertation approach these inequalities from several angles, moving from a broader mapping of mortality patterns among people with disabilities to more specific questions around avoidable deaths, cancer survival, comorbidities, and the role of socioeconomic disadvantage.
Q. What research topics would you like to pursue in the future?
I would like to continue working on disability and health inequalities, and deepen my understanding of the factors driving inequalities in this population. There is still a lot we do not know, and I think there is meaningful work to be done in improving both the methods and the data we use to study this population. I am also motivated by the idea of building closer connections with disability organizations and civil society, so that research findings can more directly inform the people and communities they concern.