The overarching aim of José Manuel's research is to produce novel insights on population health inequalities and better understand their link with social determinants of health. Theoretically and methodologically, his work follows two main strands. First, his work develops and advances formal demographic techniques to measure inequalities in the length of life and uses this perspective to generate new ways of analysing population health. Second, through these and other methodological tools, including those from statistics, data science, and computer science, his work examines the structural and social determinants of population health inequalities. For example, his work so far has examined how structural shocks like violence, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, affect population health inequalities around the globe.