News & Press Releases

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February 16, 2026 | News | New Faces at MPIDR

Welcome, Mallika Snyder!

MPIDR/Schulz

The Lab of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Well-being welcomes Mallika Snyder as a new team member. Mallika joins MPIDR after spending over two years at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in New York, where she worked as an applied demographer developing subnational population projections to inform UN humanitarian action. She is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Ph.D. program in Demography and the M.A. program in Statistics. The title of her dissertation was "Mortality Crises as Experienced by Their Survivors: Computational Approaches to the Study of Bereavement." more

February 12, 2026 | News | Overview

Recommended Reading

Here is an overview of the latest reading recommendations for papers published by scientists at the MPIDR.  more

February 06, 2026 | News | New Research Group

New Max Planck Research Group on Medical Demography

iStockphoto.com / pcess609

For more than five decades, the Max Planck Research Groups have been a key focus of promoting young scientists within the Max Planck Society. The selection process for group leader positions is rigorous. Last year, Marcus Ebeling, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), successfully completed the process. He will lead the 'Medical Demography' research group from July onwards. more

January 30, 2026 | News | Phd

Congratulations, Donata Stonkute!

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Donata Stonkute, from the Laboratory of Population Health at MPIDR, successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Measuring and Explaining the Educational Gradient in Health Across Europe: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors”, at the University of Helsinki. Her findings advance comparative ageing research and inform context-sensitive policies aimed at reducing health inequalities in older populations. more

January 29, 2026 | News

Chair of Excellence for Jutta Gampe

MPIDR/Schulz

We are happy to announce that our colleague Jutta Gampe has been appointed to the Chair of Excellence in Transformative Change: Statistical Demography at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz. more

January 15, 2026 | News

Important Relatives

iStockphoto.com / FG Trade

Family research usually focuses on the nuclear family, i.e. the father, mother and children. Relationships with other relatives have hardly been studied to date. Yet these relationships play an important role. more

December 18, 2025 | Defo News

Family, Birth Patterns Among Refugees, and Palliative Care for Dementia Patients

MPIDR

In the first article of this issue of Demografische Forschung aus Erster Hand, you will learn why family research should also focus more on relatives outside the nuclear family. The second article deals with the question of whether and when refugee women and men have children. The last article deals with palliative care for seriously ill people, which varies greatly depending on the illness. more

December 18, 2025 | News | Season´s Greetings 2025

An Eventful Year 2025

iStockphoto.com / Jenny Sturm

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) looks back on an eventful and successful year. We wish all MPIDR employees, research partners, and supporters a peaceful holiday season and a happy New Year. We look forward to 2026 and to seeing and getting to know new and familiar faces at MPIDR, at PAA 2026, EPC 2026, and many other events. more

December 16, 2025 | News | Letter to the Editor PNAS

Migration fell during the pandemic, but not in the ways we think

iStockphoto.com / imaginima

MPIDR researcher Jordan Klein publishes Letter to the Editor in PNAS. A recent PNAS study uses Facebook data to estimate monthly international migration flows worldwide. The authors report that global migration fell sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, declining by an estimated 64 percent in 2020, driven in part by the imposition of border controls, before rebounding strongly in 2022. Klein, together with Ingmar Weber have now published a Letter to the Editor in PNAS that brings these findings into conversation with the work of Chi et al. more

December 16, 2025 | News | New Faces at MPIDR

Welcome Jiseon Baek!

MPIDR/Schulz

The Laboratory of Fertility & Wellbeing welcomes Jiseon Baek as a new research scientist. Jiseon is enthusiastic about investigating disparities in reproductive outcomes. She will defend her PhD thesis on the fertility of immigrant generations in the United Kingdom at the University of St Andrews in January 2026. Before her PhD, her research interests were developed through her Master's degrees in Social Welfare at Seoul Women’s University and Social Research at the University of Edinburgh. She is excited to pursue her research on reproductive life courses at MPIDR. more

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The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.