Jenn Dowd

1/ “Historically, no one lived past age 35.” Somewhere, a demographer hears this & dies a little bit inside. #demography #mortality #aging #lifeexpectancy

By comparison, Germany’s total fertility rate still fell in 2024, but completed family size (total number of children born over a woman's reproductive life) continues to increase among women born in the 1970s due to the same reason: late births.

Remarkably, flu all but disappeared from circulation for the first two years of the COVID pandemic, & one entire influenza B lineage went extinct. But did COVID have a lasting impact on patterns of other viruses? jenndowd.substack.com/p/did-covid-ch…

Here we go again. Another company is selling embryo selection for intelligence. This time they claim to exclude the educational attainment predictor because of confounding. But the most recent data shows the intelligence predictor (which they use) is even more confounded!

📣 We are seeking to fill multiple postdoctoral positions! We have funding to fill NIH T32 program-based positions. Positions start Fall 2025, but timing is flexible! We'll begin reviewing applications July 21st, 2025 - so don't wait! Apply now! pop.umn.edu/training/postd…

We show that access to legal, subsidized abortion lowered births (and marriages) among very young women and increased their educational attainment, while long-term fertility was barely affected 🏥

I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:

Happy #WorldPopulationDay2025! A reminder that the World and US populations are still growing, not declining. jenndowd.substack.com/p/is-our-popul…

"Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, said the memos reflect wider talking points among health officials. “They seem obsessed with myocarditis, and they made a decision on that which they just have a fixed ideology that they keep…