October 07, 2025 | News | New Position
Junior Professorship for Aliakbar Akbaritabar
MPIDR researcher to become Junior Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Demography
Aliakbar Akbaritabar took up his new position as Junior 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.
Aliakbar Akbaritabar is the new assistant professor for Computational Social Science at the University of Rostock. © MPIDR/Schulz
Akbaritabar holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, Social Welfare from the Allameh Tabataba'i University (Tehran, Iran) and a Ph.D. in Economic Sociology and Labour Studies from the University of Milan (Italy). Before joining MPIDR, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the German Competence Network for Bibliometrics in Berlin.
His research focuses on science studies, migration of researchers and highly skilled populations, social networks, collaboration networks, and computational social science. He is a member of the core team of the Scholarly Migration Database, which was launched in 2023. Since then, Akbaritabar has been researching the reuse of bibliometric data for demographic and migration research at MPIDR.
“I am looking forward to working with the students. I am looking forward to helping undergraduate and graduate students in sociology and demography develop more confidence and self-awareness in dealing with large and complex digital trace data, such as textual data, bibliometric data, and social media information. I will also continue my research at the MPIDR in the area of global migration of researchers, scholars, and the highly-skilled population," says Aliakbar Akbaritabar.
Akbaritabar, A.; Castro Torres, A. F.; Larivière, V.:
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:914, 1–10. (2024)
Akbaritabar, A.; Dańko, M. J.; Zhao, X.; Zagheni, E.:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 122:15, e2424521122–e2424521122. (2025)
Zhao, X.; Akbaritabar, A.; Kashyap, R.; Zagheni, E.:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 120:10, e2214664120–e2214664120. (2023)
Şanlitürk, A. E.; Zagheni, E.; Dańko, M. J.; Theile, T.; Akbaritabar, A.:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 120:4, e2217937120–e2217937120. (2023)
Akbaritabar, A.; Theile, T.; Zagheni, E.:
Scientific Data 11:816, 1–14. (2024)