June 28, 2006 | Press Release
Jan M. Hoem has become Demographer of the Year 2006
Former MPIDR director Jan M. Hoem in his office 2006 © MPIDR
Jan M. Hoem, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, has been awarded on June 23, 2006, the IUSSP 2006 Laureate at the Annual Meeting of the European Association for Population Studies. This prestigious international award has been issued by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), an international umbrella organization for demography, in recognition of his outstanding achievements in scientific research and promoting the discipline of demography in research and teaching.
The publications of Jan Hoem span a wide range of major issues in demography. His research, for instance on the methods of analysis of longitudinal data or on the impact of social policies on family behavior, has provided the discipline with groundbreaking impulses. His methodological contributions to event-history analysis have been shaping demography up to date. Jan Hoem’s approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature: He has been attaching great importance to uniting the social science with mathematics and statistics ever since he started his scientific career. But he has always remained inquisitive about and open to the theoretical, analytical, and methodological potential of other scientific disciplines, and has encouraged his co-workers to conduct interdisciplinary research.
The efforts of Jan Hoem have always concentrated on furthering the discipline of demography, too. His strong dedication to the international research network of the Generations and Gender Programme, which combines macro-level indicators with individual-level data, has made major contributions to the success of this program. He has made a name for himself as an editor, too. He is the editor of Demographic Research, the first on-line journal available in the population sciences, and also of Demografische Forschung Aus Erster Hand (First Hand Demographic Research), a newsletter that acts as an information platform on topical research results to politicians, journalists, and the public alike.
In addition, having been a dedicated academic teacher and mentor, Jan Hoem has committed himself to the training and promotion of the next generation of demographers.
Jan Hoem has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research since 1999. He is head of the division Contemporary European Fertility and Family Dynamics and has been holding an honorary professorship at the University of Rostock since 2002.
About the MPIDR
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock investigates the structure and dynamics of populations. The Institute’s researchers explore issues of political relevance, such as demographic change, aging, fertility, and the redistribution of work over the life course, as well as digitization and the use of new data sources for the estimation of migration flows. The MPIDR is one of the largest demographic research bodies in Europe and is a worldwide leader in the study of populations. The Institute is part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research organization.