July 10, 2026 | News | PHD

Congratulations, Sanny D. Afable!

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.

Three people stand smiling next to a table, with another person visible on a large screen in a video call.

Sanny D. Afable with his supervisors Hill Kulu (left), Julia Mikolai (middle), and Megan Evans (on screen). © private

In his thesis, Sanny employs event history and decomposition analyses of longitudinal survey data from Europe and administrative data from Finland to investigate the interaction between parental health and geographic proximity to adult children in later life. He found that health deterioration was associated with changes in residence for parents and non-parents alike across Europe. Zooming in on Finland, he found that older parents and adult children have grown farther apart over the twenty-first century, primarily due to changes in population composition. Further, declining health among Finnish parents is associated with moving closer to their children, especially among those without a spouse. Close proximity, in turn, is linked to greater longevity, primarily for parents without a spouse.

Overall, the thesis demonstrates that aging and health influence where and with whom family members reside, and that family geography affects how long and how well individuals live. These findings highlight the need to address kinship and care inequalities and create conditions that enable intergenerational solidarity to flourish.

Sanny D. Afable participated in the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program that combines demography, epidemiology, and data science. His dissertation was supervised by Julia Mikolai (University of St Andrews), Megan Evans (MPIDR), Yana Vierboom (Princeton University), Hill Kulu (University of St Andrews), and Mikko Myrskylä (Director of the MPIDR).

His PhD studentship was funded by the University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). He is currently a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews, where he works with Prof. Hill Kulu to develop multistate microsimulation models that investigate homeownership, kinship geography, and other life-course processes.