Herr Prof. Dr. Kayvan Bozorgmehr

Key activities / research fields
• Health services research with a focus on social epidemiology
• Health of forced migrants
• Global health
• Health systems research

Kayvan Bozorgmehr is a medical doctor with expertise in social epidemiology and health services research. He was appointed full professor in public health and Head of Department of Population Medicine and Health Services Research at Bielefeld University in March 2019.
He graduated in medicine at Frankfurt University, obtained his medical doctorate (Dr. med.) from the Institute for Social Medicine, Epidemiology and Health Economics, Charité University Medicine Berlin, and completed a postgraduate Master of Science in Public Health at Umeå University in Sweden. He then obtained his postdoctoral lecturer qualification (Habilitation/Venia Legendi) in "Health Services Research and Social Epidemiology" at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University.

Between 2012 and 2019, he built up the Social Determinants, Equity and Migration Group at the Department of General Practice and Health Services Research at the University Hospital Heidelberg. The group was transformed to the unit "Section Health Equity Studies & Migration" in 2020 and is headed by Kayvan Bozorgmehr since then as secondary affiliation.

His scientific interests are in the area of structural, social and economic determinants of health and health system organization, with a particular focus on equity aspects, migration and transnational interdependencies. Kayvan Bozorgmehr leads several large-scale research projects on health and health care for asylum seekers and refugees and has published extensively on this topic, and has been PI of more than 15 projects in the area of public and global health.

Major projects comprise the RESPOND project (www.respond-study.org) funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the PRICARE project (www.pri.care) funded by the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), the NEXUS project (www.nexus-study.org) funded by the German Science Foundation and PROTECTING (funded by the European Asylum Migration Integration Fund).

In 2023, he has been awarded a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) for his INTERSECT project aimed at analysing migration trajectories and social, economic and political context effects.

Kayvan Bozorgmehr is an internationally acknowledged expert in the field of refugee health and has been consultant to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, the Federal Agency for Health Education , the Robert-Koch Institute , and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control . He is invited member of the Lancet Migration European Hub , and was invited external expert for the "Beirat des Pakts für den ÖGD" (a national committee set up at the Federal Ministry of Health to strengthen public health services in Germany). He functioned as advisory board member of the IMIRA project (Improving Health Monitoring in Migrant Populations) at the Robert Koch-Institute, Germany’s national public health agency. Since 2020, he is elected member of the Steering Committee of the German Alliance for Global Health Research, and functioned as reviewer for the Global Health Protection Programme of the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG). He was elected member of the Scientific Board of the Instititute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) (2020-2022) and is member of the IKG since then.

He is a member of Health Systems Global and the German Society for Epidemiology (DGEpi) , guest editor for Social Sciece & Medicine, and reviewer for leading international journals ("The Lancet Global Health, BMJ, BMJ Open, BMJ Global Health, Bulletin of the WHO, Social Science & Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, Global Health Action, Globalization and Health, Oxford Journal of Public Health"). Kayvan Bozorgmehr has received the Stephan-Weiland Prize of the German Society for Epidemiology (2015) and the Ferenc-Boyan Young Investigator Award of the European Public Health Association (2016).