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December 03, 2025 | New Faces at MPIDR
The Kinship Inequalities Research Group welcomes Elena Pojman as a new member. Prior to joining MPIDR, Elena was a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on social stratification and how it affects how people spend their time and money. For her dissertation, she used mathematical demographic methods to study how race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and gender influence partnerships and caregiving. more
November 27, 2025 | Congratulations
Philipp Dierker, from the Department of Social Demography, successfully defended his doctoral thesis, “Partnership Dynamics and Changes in Health and Well-Being: A Bidirectional Relationship,” at the University of Helsinki. His findings are relevant to family sociology, public health, and social policy because they identify groups at particular risk during partnership transitions. more
November 19, 2025 | New Position
scientists. They provide postdoctoral researchers with first-rate support to help them advance in their scientific careers. The selection procedure for Group Leader positions is rigorous. Susie Lee, research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), is one of the successful applicants. She will lead a research group to study reproductive ageing. more
November 14, 2025 | New Faces at MPIDR
Aysha Basheer joins the team of the Laboratory of Migration and Mobility at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). Aysha comes to MPIDR from the University of Manchester, where she is working toward her PhD in Social Statistics. Her thesis focuses on data-driven approaches to estimate and forecast human migration, specifically using Bayesian methods to understand patterns and determinants of migration flows.
She holds a bachelor's and master’s degree in mathematics from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune. Following her studies, she worked as a research fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. more
November 11, 2025 | Overview
Here is an overview of the latest reading recommendations for papers published by scientists at the MPIDR. more
November 05, 2025 | Research Funding
Mikko Myrskylä, the director of the MPIDR and professor at the University of Helsinki, and his colleagues, Wolfgang Lutz, the founding director of the Wittgenstein Center for Demography, Mirkka Danielsbacka, professor at the University of Turku, and Anna Rotkirch, research professor at Family Federation of Finland, will receive six million euros over the next six years to do research on population projections for migration scenarios, human capital development, and sustainable integration (MigScene). more
October 29, 2025 | Marriage or Separation
Scientists have developed a model to analyze transitions from non-marital cohabitation to either marriage or separation considering two-time scales simultaneously: the age of the individuals and the duration of the cohabitation. more
October 21, 2025
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) investigated whether the recruitment material used for online surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced respondents' answers. To this end, they analyzed the responses of people recruited via Facebook ads with or without a reference to the virus. The results showed no consistent correlation between advertising images and the wearing of medical masks or handwashing frequency. Instead, the age of the respondents and the month in which the survey was conducted were found to be more closely related to these behaviors. more
October 17, 2025 | Overview
October 07, 2025 | New Position
Aliakbar Akbaritabar took up his new position as Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Rostock on 1 October. His work at the University of Rostock is made possible through a collaboration between the University and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). Akbaritabar has been a postdoctoral research scientist at the MPIDR since 2021, where he was most recently deputy head for training in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography and before that, deputy head of the Laboratory of Migration and Mobility. more