September 14, 2026 | News | PHD

Congratulations, Adarsh!

Adarsh from the Laboratory of Population Health at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), successfully defended his doctoral thesis, “Drugs, Deaths and Cohorts “, at the University of St Andrews. His research examines population health inequalities through substance-related mortality, birth-cohort patterns, and differences in mortality trends across populations.

Adarsh successfully defended his dissertation. © private

In his thesis Adarsh investigates patterns of substance-related mortality involving drugs and alcohol in high-income countries. He places special emphasis on cohort-structured aspects, investigating how birth cohorts, structural opportunities and generational identities combine to produce these patterns.

His complex quantitative analysis provides a valuable contribution to understanding population health inequalities from a longitudinal and cohort perspective, helping to translate population-level evidence into questions relevant to health policy.

Adarsh was part of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program combining demography, epidemiology and data science. The dissertation was supervised by Enrique Acosta, Mary Abed Al Ahad, Mikko Myrskylä, and Hill Kulu. Following an embargo period, the dissertation will be published through the University of St Andrews Research Repository.