Alison Gemmill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a trained demographer with primary interests in fertility, maternal, perinatal, and reproductive health, and life course and aging. You can follow her on twitter.

Please share how your work relates to the issues and concerns that are emerging as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One area of my research studies how macrosocial stressors impact health, with a focus on pregnant women and other vulnerable populations. For example, I’m part of a research team—led by Professor Ray Catalano at UC Berkeley—that has a history of studying the population health impacts of phenomena like terrorist attacks and economic recessions on maternal and perinatal outcomes.

There’s no doubt that the effects of this pandemic will be studied for the rest of my lifetime. The studies that are coming out now are primarily focused on the most proximate effects of the virus, but examining secondary effects has tremendous potential to generate knowledge across myriad population health exposures and outcomes. For example, as someone who studies the effects of in utero exposures, the mechanisms linking the pandemic with perinatal health are incredibly complex and potentially multifactorial. Besides exposure to the virus, for example, we will need to consider changes in economic and social resources, maternal stress, exposure to environmental pollution, prenatal care utilization, and selection into pregnancy and birth, just to name a few. I think adequately addressing these complexities requires interdisciplinary approaches and teams.

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