June 30, 2025 | News | Congratulations
Antonino Polizzi Successfully Defended his Doctoral Thesis
In May, Antonino Polizzi successfully defended his doctoral thesis, "The Causes and the Consequences of Growing Life Expectancy Shortfalls" at the University of Oxford.
Antonino Polizzi successfully defended his doctoral thesis. © private
Antonino Polizzi completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at Oxford. During his time there, he was a member of the Sociology Department, Nuffield College, and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. He was part of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program that combines demography, epidemiology and data science.
In his thesis, Antonino examined life expectancy in high-income countries. While life expectancy has continuously improved in these countries, the United States (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) have recently experienced a slowdown in gains. His dissertation highlights unfavorable trends in cardiometabolic, external-cause, and working-age mortality in these countries. It also explains how these trends have contributed to their growing life expectancy shortfall compared to other high-income countries, both before and during the COVD-19 pandemic.
Professors Christiaan Monden and Jennifer Beam Dowd at the University of Oxford and Alyson van Raalte at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) supervised his thesis.
Publications
Antonino Polizzi, Jennifer Beam Dowd: Working-age mortality is still an important driver of stagnating life expectancy in the United States in PNAS (2024); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2318276121
Antonino Polizzi, Andrea M. Tilstra, Luyin Zhang, Jennifer Beam Dowd: Why is life expectancy in England and Wales falling behind? A cause-of-death decomposition approach.(Working Paper)
10.31235/osf.io/caswv
Antonino Polizzi, Luyin Zhang, Sergey Timonin, Aashish Gupta, Jennifer Beam Dowd, David A Leon, José Manuel Aburto: Indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic: A cause-of-death analysis of life expectancy changes in 24 countries, 2015 to 2022 in PNAS Nexus (2025); DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae508
Antonino Polizzi , Andrea M Tilstra: The impact of early death on birth counts in the United States, 1950 to 2019 in PNAS Nexus (2025); DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae058