Team ERES (a French acronym for Equipe de Recherche en Epidémiologie Sociale) was created in 2014, after the merger of two preexisting Inserm research groups, Equipe DS3 of the former UMRS 707 and the research team Equipe 11 of the UMRS 1018 in Villejuif. This merger served to gather synergic research resources to study processes and determinants of the social and territorial inequalities in health and health care utilization. Since 2014, ERES is one of the leading research groups in social epidemiology in France.

The general objectives of ERES are to improve knowledge of social determinants of health, and assess interventions and policies dedicated to reducing social inequalities in health and health care utilization. The results we produce help health professionals and public health decision makers adapt their practice in a context where social inequalities in health have widened in recent years across industrialized countries, despite continued increases in longevity. The specificity of our team is that it includes researchers specialized in the study of different areas of health (cancer, mental health and addiction, medical prevention practices), but also investigators who take a cross-cutting view, focusing on determinants of social inequalities with regard to multiple areas of health (neighborhood, primary care) and/or different populations (adolescents, pregnant women), including some which are hard-to-reach and marginalized (the homeless, migrants). ERES has longstanding collaborations with clinicians (primary care, HIV, psychiatry), researchers in social sciences (sociology, geography, political science) and biostatistics, within IPLESP and outside, yielding an interdisciplinary environment.

Our research covers four areas in particular:

• social determinants of health, with a particular focus on immigrant populations living in France in order to examine relations between patterns of legal status, acculturation and discrimination and health (using sources such as the CONSTANCES and ELFE cohort studies as well as the SIRS study);
• social inequalities in health across the lifecourse and across generations (ex. ELFE, EDEN and TEMPO cohort studies, BIEN-ETRE project);
• social consequences of chronic diseases (ex. CANTO, IMPACTS cohort studies);
• consequences of societal features on social inequalities in health (DEPICT, SIRS studies).