May 07, 2025 | News | Award

DGD Young Scientists Award for Anna-Kathleen Piereth

The DGD Young Scientists Award is presented at the annual conference of the German Association for Demography. This year, Anna-Kathleen Piereth from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) won the award in the category "Best Master's Thesis". She received the award in March 2025 at the DGD's annual conference in Wiesbaden for her master's thesis "The Demography of Inpatient Care: Insights from the German Diagnosis Related Groups (G-DRG) Statistics".

Award winner Anna-Kathleen Piereth. © MPIDR/Schulz

In her master's thesis at the University of Rostock, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Anna-Kathleen Piereth examined the impact of population ageing on the number of inpatients in German acute care hospitals. She identified population ageing as one of the main drivers of the significant increase in inpatient hospital cases between 2005 and 2019, and critically examined previous studies that primarily hold the economic incentives of the G-DRG system responsible for the increase in case numbers. She concludes that the importance of demographic change for the dynamics of case numbers has been underestimated in the scientific debate to date. "The case-increasing effects of population ageing should also be given greater consideration in the health policy debate on the forthcoming hospital reform in order to ensure efficient inpatient care," Piereth emphasises.

To encourage young researchers in the field of demography, the German Association for Demography (DGD) awards an annual prize for outstanding dissertations and master's theses on demographic issues. "Anna has written an excellent master's thesis. Her analysis of how demographic ageing has influenced the number of in-patient hospital cases in Germany over the past two decades makes an important contribution to research," says Prof. Roland Rau from the University of Rostock and supervisor of the prize-winning master's thesis.

Anna-Kathleen Piereth is a PhD student (enrolled in the Max Planck Research School IMPRS-PHDS) in the Laboratory of Population Health at the MPIDR in Rostock and in the Research Group Ageing and Health at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.