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August 06, 2026 | News | PHD
Athina Anastasiadou from the Laboratory of Migration and Mobility at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “The Second Migrant: The role of gender in demographic theories, methods, and data for migration research“, at University of Groningen. The thesis was awarded “cum laude”. In the Netherlands, this is a rare distinction that is awarded in roughly 5% of the cases. more
August 05, 2026 | Press Release
Heart attacks, strokes, and hip fractures are becoming less common. Meanwhile, cancer cases are increasing, and more people are surviving these severe diseases. A new study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Karolinska Institute examines how medical progress has impacted various diseases in Sweden. more
July 30, 2026 | News | Publication
Researchers investigated whether traditional statistical and machine learning models could achieve a similarly high level of accuracy in predicting individual-level lifespan. Overall, the results show that machine learning does not significantly improve mortality predictions compared to conventional methods. more
July 10, 2026 | News | PHD
Sanny D. Afable from the Laboratory of Population Health at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), successfully defended his doctoral thesis, "The Spatial Dynamics of Health and Intergenerational Ties in Later Life," at the University of St. Andrews. more
July 09, 2026 | News | News
Pension system reforms often aim to extend working life. Such reforms have been implemented throughout Europe, albeit to varying degrees in different countries. more
July 06, 2026 | News
How do family structures result from and shape social inequality? In early June, international researchers gathered at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock to tackle these very questions as part of the conference "Kinship Structures, Dynamics and Inequalities". more
June 30, 2026 | Defo News
Chancellor Friedrich Merz aims to pass the pension reform through the Bundestag by the end of the year. Several more debates are likely to take place before then. This issue features two articles that focus on pensions. One article is based on a study examining how various European countries have successfully extended working lives through reforms (spoiler: with mixed results). Additionally, Sebastian Klüsener from the Federal Institute for Population Research provides food for thought in an editorial.
The other articles are also highly relevant. Researchers demonstrate the crucial role of daycare centers in integrating Ukrainian mothers. There are also new figures on gender equality—or rather, the lack thereof. Researchers have analyzed how long mothers and fathers take parental leave in Austria. Here, too, is a spoiler: The differences are striking. more
June 24, 2026 | News | Climate Change
A recent study examined 3.4 million births in Spain between 2008 and 2021 to determine the impact of wildfires and associated air pollution on the health of newborns. The results revealed that mothers affected by wildfires were more likely to have premature births, and their children had lower birth weights, regardless of their socioeconomic status. more
June 19, 2026 | News | PHD
Angela Carollo from the Laboratory of Fertility and Well-Being at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Statistical Analysis of Time-to-Event Data with Multiple Time Scales“, at Leiden University. In her thesis she introduces a statistical model that addresses an important gap in the literature on statistical models for time-to-event data. more
June 18, 2026 | News | Award
Aliakbar Akbaritabar and Tom Theile received the EAPS Open Science and Outreach Award for Population Studies at the EPC 2026 in Bologna for their contributions to research on internal and international migration using large digital trace datasets. Central to their work is the Scholarly Migration Database, an open data infrastructure that reconstructs the national and international mobility of researchers based on global bibliometric data. more