October 05, 2023 | News | Award

Promising and Upcoming: European Demographer Award for Diego Alburez-Gutierrez

The MPIDR is happy to share that Diego Alburez-Gutierrez will receive the European Demographer Award 2023. Diego has been selected for this year’s Award for a promising and upcoming researcher who obtained their Ph.D. within the period of 2017-2022.

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez will receive the European Demographer Award 2023. © MPIDR

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez leads the Max Planck Research Group on Kinship Inequalities at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Demography and Population Studies in 2018 from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Diego’s research focuses on how differences in kin presence and availability affect the multi-generational demand for care time, the exposure to kin loss, and the inter-generational transmission of memory. He advocates for the study of kinship in demography from an empirical, theoretical, and methodological perspective with a particular interest in improving our understanding of populations in the global South.

“Diego's research utilizes insights from kinship theory to advance our understanding of demographic processes from a global perspective. This includes leveraging methods from formal and computational demography to document inequalities in kinship resources, as well as assessing the impact of wars and violence on family networks. Diego has also demonstrated a strong commitment to strengthening the demographic community, including via promotion of open science practices, development of open-source demographic software, public outreach, and training the next generation of population scientists. The European Demographer Award will serve as additional encouragement for Diego to continue on this groundbreaking path, and as a source of inspiration for aspiring demographers from all over the world,” says Emilio Zagheni, Director of the MPIDR.

The award will be presented on January 23, 2024 at the Berlin Demography Days opening event. “I am both surprised and profoundly honored to receive this award. As an immigrant from Central America living in Europe, I am part of the cycle of demographic change. It is truly humbling to have been chosen by the committee for this prestigious recognition,” Diego says about the award.

The European Demographer Award

Since 2015, Population Europe has organized the selection procedure for the European Demographer Award (formerly the Allianz European Demographer Award), which supports outstanding research on the causes and consequences of demographic change in Europe. The research should be at the frontier of anthropological, biological, economic, historical, mathematical, political, sociological or statistical population studies, achieved by researchers in the early stage of their careers or those at a more advanced stage. 

Keywords: Award; Demography; Social Sciences; Europe; Research; Kinship; Population Studies, Family