Karin Broberg is a professor of occupational and environmental medicine and her research focuses on how the environment - via the job or surroundings - can affect the body and cause disease. She uses various biomarkers in studies on humans, so-called molecular epidemiology, to understand underlying mechanisms, dose-response relationships and to identify hazardous substances in the environment at an early stage. She wants to work for increased collaboration with other academic specialties to improve and deepen epidemiological research and would like to see a reduction in the legalization of epidemiological research.
Kristina Sundquist is active as a district physician, professor of general medicine at Lund University and director of the Center for Primary Care Research.
In what way is your research area connected to epidemiology?
- In my research, I have used different methods to answer clinically relevant questions, and the many different Swedish registries are an inexhaustible source of new knowledge in cancer, cardiovascular diseases and other so-called common diseases.
Do you have any important issues you would like to pursue in the board's work?
- I would like to see us work to make data available to researchers in a simpler way, including data that has been collected in national registries. This can be done without risking the integrity of individuals. Unfortunately, I have seen that over a number of years it has become increasingly difficult to access registry data. I believe this needs to be counteracted by the entire research community.
Jonas Berge works as a psychiatrist at the Addiction centre Malmö, and he is also associate professor in psychiatry.
His research is mainly in psychiatric epidemiology where he focus on the use of register data to study population effects of drugs used for the treatment of ADHD and depression and the role of psychiatric inpatient care in suicide prevention. He also studies the co-ordination between specialist mental health care and social services in patients with comorbid psychiatric and addictive disorders, and many other topics.
Do you have any important issues you would like to pursue in the board's work?
- I would like to facilitate collaborations with social scientists in epidemiology. Over the past few decades, there has been a heavy focus in epidemiology on individual-level factors, especially in psychiatric epidemiology. While this has led to many important discoveries and insights, I believe that incorporating more social science perspectives is necessary to develop a fuller understanding of mental health issues.
