I hold a joint-PhD position between the University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Prior to starting my PhD, I worked as a biostatistics research assistant at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I obtained my Master of Public Health from the University of Edinburgh, where my dissertation was on the topic of diabetes comorbidities in low- and middle-income countries. 

My PhD aims to expand our understanding of the interplay between multimorbidity and life expectancy and to identify the contribution of micro- and macro-level drivers of inequality to population health and ageing globally. More specifically, it focusses on the concepts of multimorbid life expectancy (the years of remaining life expectancy spent with multimorbidity) and disease accumulation, and describes how these measures vary due to social and structural factors, across countries, and over time. Using a combination of discrete-time multistate Markov models and Poisson regression models against a framework of intersectionality, cumulative (dis)advantage, and life course theory, my PhD project provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic and synergistic processes and inequalities associated with population health and ageing in five countries. It finds evidence for intersectional inequalities in multimorbid life expectancy across race, education, and sex in South Africa; substantial heterogeneity within and between countries in disability-free and disabling multimorbid life expectancy in Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States; an increasing rate of disease accumulation amongst younger birth cohorts in South Korea; and considerable disparities in older age working life expectancy with and without multimorbidity across sex, education, and place of residence in South Korea. My PhD establishes multimorbid life expectancy as a valuable measure of population health that can be used to better understand how the extent of multimorbidity inequalities and the aging process differ across contexts. It also provides important policy implications by identifying who is most disadvantaged across several axes of inequality and will thus require additional consideration in implementation programmes. Lastly, my PhD highlights that patterns of inequality identified from studies in Western countries are not always generalisable to other parts of the world, underscoring the urgent need to broaden the geographic scope of demographic research to better understand the global heterogeneity in health and ageing.