NCRR, Aarhus University
- Linking Danish researchers with international epidemiology consortia
The National Centre for Register-based Research has an outstanding reputation for psychiatric epidemiology, and has a strong track record in international collaboration. The Niels Bohr Professorship will develop cross-link with the World Mental Health Survey initiative, the University of Queensland, and with the Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder group of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Professor Preben Bo Mortensen is Director at the National Centre for Register-based Research. He has devoted his career to identifying and pursuing ways of using the information stored in the Danish population-based registers to address research questions related to the epidemiology of psychiatric disorders. Over the last ten years he has extended this to include biobanked material, thereby extending to large-scale population-based genetic studies as well as studies of gene-environment interactions. Preben Bo Mortensen is also Scientific Director of iPSYCH, the AU program combining genetic and environmental analyses in a total national birth cohort of more than to million Danes.
Professor Carsten B. Pedersen has strong skills in research and data management of a wide range of health-related registers, including the Danish Civil Registration System, the Danish Psychiatric Research Register, The National Patient Register, The Medical Birth Register, The Cause of Death Register, The Danish Twin Register, the Danish Address and Road Database and The Danish Neonatal Screening Biobank. He has managed the Family relations database for the National Board of Health containing most of the above mentioned health registers. Currently, he is involved in research programs on psychiatric epidemiology such as CIRRAU (exploring adverse outcomes in children and adolescents understanding) and iPSYCH.
Esben Agerbo is a Professor at Aarhus University and his main area of research is register-based epidemiology. He has particularly been active in the fields of social and psychiatric epidemiology and recently in genetic epidemiology. His current focus is on interdisciplinary research where his main task is to promote and facilitate register-based research in the areas of Social Sciences, Health Sciences and the Natural Sciences at Aarhus University. Professor Esben Agerbo has a long and fruitful cooperation with international researchers including researchers involved in IPPE such as Niels Bohr Professor John McGrath and professor Naomi Wray (University of Queensland).
Thomas Munk Laursen is Professor at the National Centre for Register-Based Research. He has extensive experience in the use of a wide range of Danish population registries as data sources. His main area of research is to examine the somatic comorbidity in persons with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and developing a better understanding of how these impacts on mortality. In 2015 he was appointed a WHO consultant in a project that has the goal of reducing the high mortality found among people with mental disorder. The goal is to describe the magnitude of the excess mortality, and furthermore to advise WHO on the next steps to decrease excess mortality among persons with severe mental disorders.
Dr. Oleguer Plana Ripoll completed his PhD in 2016 at the Faculty of Public Health at Aarhus University. As PhD he was a member of the Nordic Perinatal Bereavement Research group working with data from 5-million individuals in Denmark and in Sweden studying the effects of stress during pregnancy on maternal and child health. Since then he has been Research Assistant on Mindhood – The Child Mental Health Research Program at Department of Public Health at Aarhus University. Dr. Oleguer Plana Ripoll is now member of the NCRR-staff, where he has taken a lead role in measuring patterns of mental health comorbidity within the Danish Registers. He is a Research Fellow employed full time on the NB-Como Project.