February 06, 2012 | News

Young Investigator Award for Eva Kibele

Eva Kibele will be awarded the Young Investigator Award of the German Society for Demography (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Demographie, DGD). In her doctoral thesis she studied how mortality in Germany differs by region and how theses differences are evolving.

A population group's mortality risk is a good indicator of the health status of the people within this group. And yet, regional differentials in mortality risk and the factors determining that risk are widely unknown when it comes to Germany. Eva Kibele investigated regional mortality differences in Germany and identified the factors underlying the variation. She found out, for example, that the life expectancy of low-incomers is particularly low, and especially so in economically deprived regions. She also discovered that the mortality rates in Eastern and Western Germany, largely divergent at unification, have largely - though not fully - converged.

Her analyses are innovative: It is for the first time ever that temporal characteristics have been taken into account in analyses of small-area mortality and regional data been linked with individual-level data. Prior studies so far had focused mainly on mortality variation between the regional states of Germany ("Bundesland") or on differences between the regions of these states.

Eva Kibele was a PhD student at the MPIDR from 2005 to 2010. Her dissertation “Regional mortality differences in Germany. Spatial patterns, temporal trends, contextual- and individual-level determinants” was supervised by Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, head of the Laboratory of Demographic Data. Since 2011 she is working at the Population Research Centre of the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

She will be awarded the “Allianz-Nachwuchs-Preis für Demographie” in the category „Dissertation/ Habilitation“ by the German Society for Demography. The award ceremony will take place in mid-March at the annual society meeting.