Norwegian researcher receives the prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study adult men's health
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Vegard Skirbekk from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) receives the ERC Advanced grant, which supports the most ground-breaking research in Europe. He will investigate how men’s family and working lives influence their disease risk, level of functioning and cognitive development throughout life. Why do some men experience much better health than others over the course of their lives?
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Go to the home pageMen are more likely than women to die prematurely, and a great deal of men’s excess mortality is preventable.
“Improving men’s health and cognition is not only critical for achieving gender equality, but also for enhancing and extending men’s potential to contribute to their families, the labour market and society as populations grow older,” says Skirbekk.
Professor Skirbekk is principal researcher at the Center for Fertility and Health at the NIPH, and Professor II at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. He will lead the new project “Health, Cognition, Family, and Employment among Men” – HOMME, and the work will be carried out at both the NIPH and the University of Oslo.
HOMME will study how men’s (changing) family and working lives influence their health and cognition from teenage years to their sixties.
The project will involve researchers from multiple countries and will recruit new positions. The insights gained from HOMME are expected to give us a better understand men's health development from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Men's family and working lives are changing
Men now lag behind women with regards to tertiary education; female labour participation has increased while male labour participation has slightly decreased. Men are more apt to lose their job due to technological change. Male childlessness has risen dramatically, much more than female childlessness. Fathers are participating more in childcare, and men have partially lost their role as family “breadwinners”.
So far, insufficient research has examined the consequences of these changes on adult men’s health and cognition. HOMME capitalizes on the richness of Norwegian population register, survey, and genetic data to examine how men’s (rapidly changing) family and working lives are related to their health and cognition across adulthood, as well as across cohorts, periods and between communities.
“We will focus on young adulthood and midlife – the life period most characterized by family transitions and work experiences. We examine cohort and period differences, men’s work-face interface, the male breadwinner model and fathers’ participation in childcare, and disentangle selection and causality. Our data covers genes; parents, (former) spouses and partners; self-reported, clinical, and register measures of health; register data on work participation and occupation; and cognitive trajectories of men between the late teens to ages 36 to 69,” says Skirbekk.
About the ERC Advanced Grant
The Advanced Grant is the most prestigious grant awarded by the European Research Council. The grant is 2.5 million Euros and is awarded to outstanding research leaders across Europe. This year, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded 255 Advanced Grants to researchers across Europe, as part of the Horizon Europe programme. The grants - totaling €652 million - support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.
