May 30, 2012 | News

Congratulations!

Pavel Grigoriev from the Laboratory of Demographic Data has successfully defended his PhD thesis titled  "Health crisis in Belarus as reflected by cause-of-death and regional mortality trends and patterns" on May 25, 2012 at the University of Rostock.

In the former USSR, and after its collapse in the Newly Independent States, mortality has increased tremendously in the last decades. This phenomenon, unprecedented in history, has received large attention from the research community as mortality increases in countries that are not at war never have been observed before.

For many years, mortality trends in Belarus have remained under-explored, largely because of a lack of detailed and comparable mortality data. With his PhD thesis, Pavel Grigoriev has now closed this gap. It is the first study that provides a systematic analysis of mortality in Belarus over the last four decades. He reconstructed and analyzed long-term mortality trends by causes of death and highlighted the important pecularities of the Belarusian health crisis. Pavel Grigoriev analyzed the spatial distribution of mortality, performed statistical analyses of mortality determinants, and explored the effects of the Chernobyl accident on recent mortality patterns. Having used individual-level data, he also analyzed the trends in self-perceived health and its determinants.

The thesis was written as a cumulative dissertation comprising four articles. By now, all of them have either been published or the have been accepted for publication