Research Associate in Social Determinants
Email: aa872@medschl.cam.ac.uk
Background
Aytalina Azarova is a scholar of political science, public health and Russian studies.
Before coming to DPHPC, she taught at SVFU (Russia) and CEU (Hungary). She has worked in the areas of health economics, comparative institutional economics and Russian society. Her publications have appeared in the Lancet, BMC, International Journal of Public Health, International Journal of Cancer, and other flagship medical journals. During her time in the Department of Sociology at University of Cambridge she worked under the auspices of the Privmort research group where she combined administrative and research tasks, and was the first author of the major publication of this large ERC project.
Her research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to study institutional change and its effects on individual action and individual health. Relying primarily on innovative survey and statistical analysis methods, she applies insights from political economy to the study of public health and epidemiology.
Aytalina generally engages in all stages of primary data collection for research projects, and has been involved in designing epidemiologic and social surveys, interviews, and data collection from unofficial sources. Her most recent work examined the impact of partner’s education on mortality in Eastern Europe, as well as the consequences of between-country variation in the speed of economic change for public health and longevity.
She was previously a visiting scholar at the Harriman Centre of Columbia University (USA) and a principal investigator of an RCT at Moscow State University.
Research Interests
Aytalina has illuminated issues of inequality, public health, and gender in her research. She focuses particularly on the social and demographic determinants of health of individuals in transition. She is interested in designing and implementing analyses for identifying the up-stream mediators and moderators of health effects, particularly in individual level data, and developing new statistical methods in this area.
Research Projects
Since 2020: CAPABLE: Cambridge Program to Assist Bangladesh in Lifestyle and Environmental Risk Reduction. Tasks: carrying out statistical analysis of the association between socioeconomic determinants and mortality.
2013-2017: Privmort: The Impact of Privatisation on the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe (EU FP7-IDEAS-ERC), University of Cambridge. Tasks: drafting the Research and Final Activity report on the project; carrying out statistical analysis of the association between privatisation and mortality; coordinating fieldwork in three eastern European countries; quality assurance of the datasets; verification of interviews; compiling the higher level databases on socioeconomic indicators.
2012-2014. Roma Initiatives Office of the Open Society Foundations: ‘Developing a New Employees Pay Scale Across 10 Countries of the EU’: designing an innovative statistical methods for harmonising labour compensation for employees in NGO sectors; carrying out background research and collecting data; carrying out statistical analysis and drafting the report.
2008-2009: GDN: ‘Explaining the Dynamics of Institutional Change, Policy Choices and Economic Outcomes during Post-communist Transition.’ designing the protocol for the collecting and processing primary research data; collecting the research data and coding; drafting the report.
Key Publications: Journal Articles
2018 Azarova A., Irdam D., McKee M., King L. (under review) ‘Gendered educational differentials and mortality inequalities in Russia, Belarus and Hungary’, BMJ.
2018 Azarova A., Murphy, M., … King L. (forthcoming) Deindustrialisation: How Employment Shock Affected All-cause Mortality in 20 towns in Sverdlovsk oblast: a retrospective cohort study. EJPH
2018 Stefler, D., Azarova A., Murphy, M., McKee, M., King, L. Smoking, alcohol and cancer mortality in Eastern European men: findings from the PrivMort retrospective cohort study. International Journal of Cancer, Manuscript ID IJC-17-3267.R1
2018 Gugushvili, A., Azarova, A., Irdam, D., Crenna-Jennings, W., Murphy, M., McKee, M., & King, L. (2018). Correlates of frequent alcohol consumption among middle-aged and older men and women in Russia: A multilevel analysis of the PrivMort retrospective cohort study. Drug and alcohol dependence, 188, 39-44.
2018 Gugushvili, A., McKee, M., Azarova, A., Murphy, M., Irdam, D., & King, L. Parental transmission of smoking among middle-aged and older populations in Russia and Belarus. International Journal of Public Health, 1-10.
2018 Gugushvili, A., McKee, M., Murphy, M., Azarova, A., Irdam, D., Doniec, K., & King, L. (2018). Intergenerational mobility in relative educational attainment and health-related behaviours. Social Indicators Research, 1-29.
2017 Azarova A., Irdam D., Gugushvili A., … King L. The effect of rapid privatisation on mortality in mono-industrial towns in post-Soviet Russia: a retrospective cohort study. The Lancet. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30072-5.
2017 Scheiring, G.; Stefler, D.; Irdam, D.; Fazekas, M; Azarova, A.; Kolesnikova, I; Bobak, M.;McKee, M.; King, L; Murphy, M. The gendered effects of foreign investment and prolonged state ownership on mortality in Hungary: an indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study, The Lancet Global Health. DOI: 10.1016/S2214-109X(17)30391-1
Research Groups and Affiliations
The Cambridge public health research network, PublicHealth@Cambridge, one of the five Strategic Research Networks at the University of Cambridge
Data Science for Social Good (fellowship) at the University of Chicago