I’m an economist and a postdoctoral researcher in the Section for Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the School of Economics at the University of Bristol, where I worked from 2020 to 2026. I completed my PhD in economics at the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. I’m a co-investigator in the European Social Science Genetics Network.
My research examines the links between people’s environments, genetics and outcomes, with a focus on how early-life circumstances shape later-life health and human capital. My applied work has studied the long-run effects of early-life pollution, nutrition and health care.
I also work on how to use AI and machine learning to build data for research, especially extracting data from handwritten historical documents, and on applying neural networks to time-series modelling. I’ve worked with data ranging from population-level Danish administrative data to large-scale biobank and genetic data (UK Biobank, iPSYCH) and spatial and weather data (GIS), as well as image data, in both HPC and cloud computing environments.
Alongside my academic research, I work as an AI and machine learning consultant, where I’ve advised on image segmentation and transcription, and I’m currently building a production pipeline for handwritten text recognition for a large-scale digitisation project, where I train and deploy the transcription models.
I’ve been writing software for more than 25 years, starting with web development and early browser-based computer games, and it remains a major interest. I’m especially interested in low-level optimisations, data-driven architectures, rendering, and game engines (shaders and GPUs!). I know R, JavaScript and Python really well, and am decent at C too.
You can reach me at emil dot soerensen at sund.ku.dk or e dot sorensen at bristol.ac.uk