Visiting INVEST: Cecilia Potente

In the “INVEST visitors” series, we present visiting professors and fellows who have arrived at the flagship INVEST. The series is opened by assistant professor Cecilia Potente.

Visitor

My name is Cecilia Potente and I am a social demographer striving to reduce health inequalities. I am assistant professor in Socio-medical Sciences at Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

In my research I combine life course sociology, biodemography and social genomics with an economics tool set, to examine the link between socioeconomic factors and health throughout the aging process and in young adulthood.

My interests focus particularly on the role of the partner and on intergenerational relationships for the development of health inequalities.

Why INVEST?

I am excited to work in collaboration with the researchers in INVEST to understand better the role of socio-demographic processes in the development of health inequalities. Talking with INVEST’s researchers will not only enrich my work but also offer exciting learning opportunities. I’m keen to learn from their expertise, which I believe will greatly improve my research approach and expand my knowledge.

By joining the research center for the visiting period, I also hope there would be a fruitful exchange of ideas and methodologies, fostering possible future research projects. This prospect excites me and underscores my motivation to contribute to and learn from the research community at INVEST.

Expectations

During the Invest Fellowship Programme, I would like to focus especially on how partnership formation and partners’ socioeconomic resources are linked to individual health, within heterosexual couples, by using advanced quantitative methods and high-quality Finnish register data.

The literature so far has largely focused on how different educational pairings are associated with life events, such as the transition to a coresidential partnership, marriage and cohabitation, or childbirth. However, there is a limited understanding of how homogamy, hypergamy and hypogamy are associated with health and mortality at the individual level.

I also hope to connect with researchers at INVEST and I believe exciting opportunities for collaboration for future research projects may also arise.

INVEST visitors will present our visiting professors and fellows. Visiting professor is a professor from another university who has been invited to teach or conduct research at the INVEST Research Flagship for a fixed period, usually for 1–2 academic years. Fellow is a researcher from post-doctoral studies onwards, who has been granted a short-term visiting fellow position to the INVEST Fellowship Programme to build and strengthen long-term collaboration with INVEST researchers and projects organised under six research themes.