Jasmin Abdel Ghany is a Nuffield Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow (at Nuffield College, Oxford). Her research examines how climate change and environmental exposures shape social stratification — in socioeconomic attainment, fertility, and health.
Jasmin’s work pursues three questions: how adverse environmental impacts are unequally distributed across social groups; how environmental exposures stratify life chances from birth onwards; and through which pathways – socio-behavioural and biological – the environment produces social outcomes.
Her current research examines how extreme heat shapes educational and socioeconomic attainment in the United States. In her doctoral work, Jasmin showed that extreme heat shapes the sex ratio at birth through gender-discriminatory behaviour and pregnancy loss (PNAS), and that apparent post-birth advantages among heat-exposed infants reflect selective survival. In a study of 52 low- and middle-income countries, she shows that extreme heat widens inequality during pregnancy: better-off mothers adapt, while disadvantaged mothers fall further behind.
She has also been an active voice on the future of global survey data infrastructure (PNAS). To contribute to shaping environmental social research internationally, she was appointed as co-chair of the IUSSP Panel on Climate and Environmental Demography and as a steering committee member of the EAPS Working Group on Climate Demography.
Jasmin Abdel Ghany holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Social Research from the University of Edinburgh. Before pursuing graduate studies, she contributed to anti-poverty and sustainable development campaigns in international development, policy and advocacy, and large-scale data collection organisations.
Research interests: environmental sociology; social inequalities and social stratification; early life exposures; quantitative methods