Dr Corinna Elsenbroich was conferred to the Fellowship of the Academy in spring 2026. She is a Reader of Computational Modelling in Social and Public Health Science at the University of Glasgow. A sociologist, Corinna’s research focuses on social and health inequalities and making complexity methods relevant for policy analysis and decision making.
Dr Corinna ElsenbroichFAcSS
Corinna uses computational modelling to explore inequalities, including the economic determinants of health, understanding health inequalities across the life course, and inequalities resulting from housing market dynamics. She co-directed System science In Public Health and health Economics Research (SIPHER), is a member of the executive group and Workstrand Lead of Policy Modelling for Health (UKRI-PHI) and has received funding from numerous bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research, among others.
As part of her work, Corinna collaborates with government bodies and departments to help improve policy, including Public Health Scotland, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, Greater Manchester and West Midlands Combined Authorities.
Corinna is also on the editorial boards of Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation and the International Journal of Microsimulation, and she co-authored the recently published textbook, Becoming an Agent-based Modeller (Routledge).
Why do the social sciences matter?
The most pressing problems we face, like poverty, climate change, conflicts, institutional distrust, are fundamentally social problems, rooted in inequality, stratification and exclusion. To understand how societies emerge and change, we need to understand people and the mechanisms through which they interact. Social science is the rigorous endeavour to make sense of these complex systems, with the ultimate goal of helping us steer them towards a better place.
What inspires you about your work?
What inspires me most is the humility that social complexity demands. You cannot compartmentalise or control a social system, you have to do hard intellectual work to uncover the processes and mechanisms underneath. I love working out which methods give us genuine insight, and I am fascinated by the layered understanding we need to get any real handle on social phenomena. This is especially energising in applied settings, where the demands of complexity meet the urgency of the policy world.
What is the most urgent issue social scientists need to tackle?
We need to return to a genuine pursuit of understanding how the social world actually works. Whether the challenge is inequality, climate change or threats to democracy, we need methods that can truly grapple with social complexity, including the complexity that comes from the fact that people experience and understand the world in fundamentally different ways.
What does being a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences mean to you?
To me, becoming a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences means joining those who believe that rigorous social science is not just an intellectual pursuit but a responsibility, a commitment to understanding the complexity of the social world and changing it for the better.