Open Seminar: Fernando Hartwig

Title: Contributions of the Pelotas birth cohorts to studying the relationship between early-life poverty and health.

Summary: Birth cohorts are a type of epidemiological study where participants are enrolled in the study at birth (or even before that by recruiting pregnant women). This study design is very useful to study long term effects of early-life factors on health and development. There are four birth cohorts in Pelotas, a middle-sized city in the extreme south of Brazil, where all infants delivered in maternity hospitals and born to mothers living in the urban area of Pelotas in a given year (1982, 1993, 2004, 2015, thus comprising the four cohorts) where invited to participate. In 1982, most large-scale birth cohorts were in high income countries, thus hampering that questions of relevance to lower income countries were addressed using such study design. Pelotas, especially in 1982, had marked social inequities, thus allowing studying social determinants of health throughout the lifecourse. In this lecture, I will briefly present the four Pelotas birth cohorts and provide examples of their contributions to the field of social epidemiology.

Biography: Dr Hartwig received his MSc and Doctorate degrees in Epidemiology at Federal University of Pelotas (Brazil), where he currently is an assistant professor in Epidemiology and a permanent researcher at the Postgraduate Program in Epidemiology. Dr Hartwig also holds an honorary research fellow position at Bristol Medical School (University of Bristol, UK). His research interests are related to the field of causal inference in epidemiology, with emphasis on empirical and methodological work on instrumental variable analysis. He is also interested in translation of statistical methods between different fields of epidemiology.