INEQKILL’s PI Isabelle Devos is the co-supervisor of the COST Action ‘The great leap. Multidisciplinary approaches to health inequalities, 1800-2022 (GREATLEAP)’.
A COST Action is an interdisciplinary research network that brings researchers and innovators together to investigate a topic of their choice for 4 years. COST Actions are typically comprised of researchers from academia, SMEs, public institutions, and other relevant organizations or interested parties.
Embracing the COST Mission, the Great Leap takes a unique, multidisciplinary approach from a historical perspective to understand better the roots and drivers of health inequalities across regions and countries in Europe and beyond. To achieve this mission, the Great Leap creates an international, multidisciplinary network that will bundle expertise, techniques, insights, and data to create
(1) the first international comparable dataset of individual-level historical cause of death data,
(2) innovative analytical tools to analyze it, and
(3) insights into how this information can be used in current public health policy and practice.
The network includes a wide range of academic expertise in history, social sciences, life sciences, and epidemiology and involves university-, research-, government- and (international) health institutes and organizations, including statistical offices and national archives. The network has deliberately chosen a balanced gender (52.5% male, 45.5% female, 2% non-binary), ITC (52%), and YRI (51%) representation, and aims to maintain this while expanding its network internationally. By fostering the strengths of this unique, multidisciplinary, and diverse network, the Great Leap aims to generate ground-breaking insights into the historical roots and drivers of health inequalities across regions and countries in Europe and beyond.