Ines Lindner

Department of Econometrics & OR 
VU University Amsterdam

PRESENTATION

Bio:

My name is Ines Lindner. My background is Mathematical Economics. The reason why I started to work on the topic networks is that it enriches existing classical social and economic theories. In fact, I have often experienced that it answers long tackled open questions.

Topic:

I would like to talk about a recent trend in biogerontology. Mortality of humans has long been modeled by Gompertz’s law which says that people’s mortality increases exponentially with age.  However, people don’t just die from old age. Rather, health is a complex network of interacting nodes where the nodes represent individual deficits. Here, mortality is the result of a cascade on a network that allows the development of new analytic tools. This approach contributes to understanding the observed heterogeneity in health between individuals of the same age. In particular, it explains why the so-called Frailty Index (FI) is an established health assessment tool. The latter can be re-interpreted as an accumulation measure following a network dynamic.