In June 2025, Lisa Bornscheuer defended her doctoral thesis, Beating the odds of a bad hand: studies of health and socioeconomic disadvantage in adults with experience of childhood adversity.
She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on two CHESS projects: The unequal pandemic: investigating health equity and political responses to COVID-19 and WIRE: which aspects of the stay in special residential homes for young people can contribute to resilience?
Q: What is your academic background, and what led you to pursue a PhD?
My background is in international politics, to begin with, and while studying that, I became more and more interested in health and the politicisation of health. This eventually led to a switch from politics to health economics and public health epidemiology. What I liked most about the idea of doing a PhD in Sweden was the chance to continue learning – both in terms of content and methods – while gradually becoming more independent as a researcher, and still having a solid support system around me.
Q. Much of your doctoral work focused on the concept of resilience, which you are continuing to study in your post-doctoral research. What is resilience, and how does it relate to health inequalities?
Resilience as a concept is used in several fields, such as psychology, life course research, and sustainability science. It fundamentally represents the notion that systems can successfully adapt when encountering adversity, given that there is access to a sufficient number of suitable resources to help tackle the respective challenges. In other words, resilience captures the idea of adapting to or bouncing back from adversity. It is an important topic in research on childhood development, for example in relation to adverse childhood experiences, and in adult psychology, for example in relation to stressful life events, such as the sudden loss of a loved one. I believe that resilience, when understood as a fluctuating process rather than an intrinsic human capacity, is a fundamental piece in the puzzle of how we can flatten the social gradient in health outcomes. Disadvantages and vulnerabilities tend to accumulate over the lifecourse, with people being dealt different life chances depending on the context they are born into. Research on resilience shifts the focus and asks the question of how to interrupt the accumulation of disadvantage across individual lifecourses and, ultimately, generations.
Q. Your post-doctoral work also focuses on health inequalities in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. What research are you currently pursuing on this topic?
We are currently working on a manuscript that examines the socioeconomic gradient in COVID-19 outcomes across the entire care cascade — from phone calls to medical advice helplines to intensive care admissions. Few studies have been able to investigate multiple COVID-19 outcomes simultaneously using representative, individual-level data, and this has not been explored as comprehensively before. The main interest is in how educational attainment and income shape the gradient in COVID-19 outcomes, both individually and in intersection with other social dimensions, such as gender and country of birth.
Q. What research topics would you like to pursue in the future?
In the near future, I would be interested to look into the social determinants of long COVID and the burden it creates, both in terms of health and socioeconomic outcomes, as well as possible resilience factors in this context.
Lisa’s thesis is available at: DiVA