May 08, 2019 | News | Conference Announcement

5th Human Mortality Database Symposium

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Department of Demography of University of California at Berkeley, USA are organizing jointly the 5^th Human Mortality Database Symposium on “Recent Trends and Future Uncertainties in Longevity” and the Satellite Meeting on "Mortality data and methodological approaches in estimating mortality in developing countries". The meetings are taking place at The Conference Venue of the Max Planck Society in Berlin (Harnack Haus) on 13-15^th of May, 2019.

The 5^th HMD Symposium (13-14 May 2019) is devoted to demographic, epidemiologic, and public health research on mortality, longevity, and health across national and sub-national populations. It also aims at addressing major themes and challenges of substantive research as well as methodological and data issues. In addition to contributing to the scientific program, participants will provide feedback and suggestions on the currently available contents and on the methods used as well as to propose future developments for the Human Mortality Database Project.

The major symposium themes include, but are not limited to:

Methods of population-level mortality analyses
Overcoming data challenges: quality assessment and methods
Frontiers of longevity. Survival and health at advanced ages
Recent unfavorable changes in mortality in high-income countries.
Causes of death and determinants of mortality
Convergence and divergence in the length of life over the globe
Longevity and health differences within national populations

The satellite meeting (15 May 2019) is dedicated to discussions on the possible extension of the HMD approach to middle- and low-income countries. The goal is to obtain reliable and consistent mortality estimates by using country-specific data-intensive approaches combined with standardized methods and uniform principles. The HMD team considers China and India as a priority because of their global importance and because of the increasing availability of large data sets from censuses and sample registration or surveillance systems.

Themes of the satellite meeting include:

Data quality and availability in China, India, and other middle- and low-income countries.
Methodological innovations in direct and indirect mortality estimations
Advantages and disadvantages of model-based mortality estimates

Organizers

Dmitri A. Jdanov (main organizer) is Head of Laboratory of Demographic Data at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He is a mathematician and demographer who is interested in demographic data. His research focuses on inequality in mortality, longevity trends, quality of demographic data, health of aging population, and biomarkers of health and aging.

Vladimir M. Shkolnikov (Director of the Human Mortality Database) is a researcher with an expertise in methods for measurement, decomposition and analysis of health differences between populations and across individuals; studying mortality and health in Russia and Eastern Europe; study on health and social change in societies; biomarker studies on health and aging; studying alcohol harm and other determinants of premature death among adults.

Domantas Jasilionis (organizer of the satellite meeting) is a demographer who is interested in demographic data and their quality assessment methods. Domantas studies focus on longevity trends and disparities across and within countries. He participates in a number of collaborative studies examining changes and determinants of socio-economic disparities in developed and developing countries.

Magali Barbieri (Associate Director of the Human Mortality Database and Director of the United States Mortality Database) has a joint research position in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the French Institute for Demographic Research (INED) in Paris. She specializes on mortality and causes of death, in high-income countries especially and most specifically on the United States.

Carl Boe is a demographer and an information system analyst for the Human Mortality Database in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been more particularly involved in the development of computer codes for the project and has contributed to scientific projects using the HMD as their main data resources.