Naja Hulvej Rod was shaped by curious idol in the US

When Naja Hulvej Rod aged 27 was a PhD student at UCLA in Los Angeles, she met the German-born professor Beate Ritz.

Three days a week, Beate Ritz, a professor of epidemiology, set out during her lunch break to find a lecture from a different field – often from a completely different faculty than her own – and she often brought Naja Hulvej Rod along on these walks around campus.

“She was very curious, knew all kinds of people around campus and read articles from small, obscure journals I had never heard about. And it clearly affected her research, which always had a twist, because she was open and dared to do things differently,” says Naja Hulvej Rod.

Beate Ritz’ inquisitive, interdisciplinary approach to research has inspired Naja Hulvej Rod throughout her almost 20-year career – the past four years as professor and head of section at Epidemiology at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

They were curious about each other’s work and read a lot of popular science on all kinds of topics. It may have affected my inclination for interdisciplinarity

And it is partly because of this approach that Naja Hulvej Rod now receives the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s Elite Research Prize – a DKK 1.2-million prize, which is awarded once a year to outstanding researchers in Denmark.

Naja Hulvej Rod is very happy and proud to receive the Elite Research Prize. According to the nomination, Naja Hulvej Rod has “generated crucial new insights,” “helped advance the methods of epidemiology” and “combines data from population surveys, records, citizen science and clinical studies in new and innovative ways.”

“It is a great recognition of my work and the way I do research,” she says over the phone from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Amsterdam, where she will act as a fellow for the next six months. Here she will exchange knowledge with researchers from different fields, including sociology, physics, data science and complex public health issues.

Mathematics and literature as a child

Naja Hulvej Rod’s interest in cross-disciplinary thinking can be traced back to her parents. Her dad was a mathematician and her mother a school teacher with a passion for literature.

“They were curious about each other’s work and read a lot of popular science on all kinds of topics. It may have affected my inclination for interdisciplinarity,” she says.

In upper secondary school, Naja Hulvej Rod wrote papers on i.a. the increase in population, because she loved the fact that it enabled her to nerd out data, while being mindful of the fact that the figures could say something more specific about society.

And it therefore made good sense when she in 1999 applied for the newly created study programme in Public Health at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Public Health.

“It gave me a chance to be interdisciplinary, and the fact that it was a brand new programme was fun. At the time, my main focus really was not health,” she says laughing.

But her interest in public health increased as she did her bachelor’s degree, and since the PhD project at UCLA a main focus of Naja Hulvej Rod’s research has been the ways in which social structures affect public health in Denmark.

“We need to understand how societal changes affect our health, e.g. stress, the corona lockdown or smartphone’s effect on our sleep, especially among young people.”

“I focus actively on implementing my research”

Naja Hulvej Rod is one of the leading stress researchers in the country. Aside from writing several books on the topic, she has for the past three years headed the large-scale research project DANLIFE, which adopts new approaches to documenting the health consequences of social and family-related adversity early in life – both for the individual citizen and for society. The research is based on life data on two million Danish children.

“We are the first in Denmark and the world to document the health burden associated with severe adversity in childhood, and the figures are pretty alarming. Some children struggle with severe social and family issues in childhood, which is evident from the number of hospitalisations and their increased risk of dying as young adults. And this is often repeated by the next generation. Through DANLIFE, we hope to be able to stop this development,” she says.

Naja Hulvej Rod has also chosen an untraditional approach in the project SmartSleep, which aims to show how smartphones affect our sleep. In connection with this project, she has cooperated with Danmarks Radio (the Danish Broadcasting Corporation) and the programme Go’ Morgen P3, among others, and thus compiled data on 25,000 Danes.

“I focus actively on implementing my research. Dialogue with citizens, politicians and NGOs gives me feedback on my research and helps me see what needs to be documented if we are going to be able to implement prevention initiatives and improve public health,” Naja Hulvej Rod explains.

When corona struck in spring 2020, Naja Hulvej Rod quickly launched the research project “Stand together by keeping a distance” (Danish title: “Stå sammen ved at holde afstand”). The project focusses on how isolation, teleworking and home schooling affect our mental health, and insight from the project has been used in both the public debate and by the Government in connection with the reopening of the country.

Naja Hulvej Rod plans to use the funds that come with the Elite Research Prize on all the things that normally do not get research funding, she says.

“Perhaps I will spend it on contemplating better ways of implementing and communicating research to society. Perhaps producing graphics, videos or other means of research dissemination – possibly through art.”

She receives the Elite Research Prize at the annual award ceremony, which is attended by the Minister for Higher Education and Science, members of the Royal House and representatives of the Danish research landscape.

Contact

Professor og sektionsleder Naja Hulvej Rod
nahuro@sund.ku.dk
+45 35 32 67 35

Presse- og kommunikationskonsulent Liva Polack
liva.polack@sund.ku.dk
+ 45 23 68 03 89