Laboratory

Population Health

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Detailed Description

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Increasing longevity is one of the greatest achievements of modern societies. At the same time, it poses profound challenges for individuals, health systems, and welfare states. As populations age, understanding not only how long people live, but also how healthy those additional years are, has become a central scientific and policy priority. Population health seeks to quantify the extent to which gains in life expectancy are accompanied by gains in healthy life expectancy, and to identify the factors that shape health trajectories and inequalities across populations.

Research in the Laboratory of Population Health addresses three overarching questions. First, are the additional years of life gained through increasing longevity spent in good or poor health? Second, which demographic, socioeconomic, behavioral, and structural factors shape health and mortality across the life course and across populations? Third, which methodological innovations are needed to better measure, analyze, and forecast population health? To answer these questions, we combine perspectives from demography, sociology, economics, epidemiology, and statistics.

A central focus of the Laboratory is the study of healthy aging and health inequalities. We investigate how improvements in longevity are distributed across social groups and whether gains in life expectancy are accompanied by reductions or expansions in disability and morbidity. These questions are critical for understanding individual well-being, projecting future demands on health and social security systems, and informing policies that promote healthy and equitable aging.

Our research adopts both life course and population perspectives to examine how demographic, behavioral, genetic, and social and structural conditions shape health and mortality. We analyze the independent and interacting effects of behavioral risk factors—including cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, obesity, and other health-related behaviors—as well as structural conditions such as living standards, economic development, health care access, and social policies. We further investigate how health trajectories differ by educational attainment, family composition, migration background, ethnicity, and other sociodemographic characteristics, while considering variation across countries, birth cohorts, historical periods, and regional contexts.

To capture the multidimensional nature of health, we use comprehensive measures based on physical and cognitive functioning, diagnosed diseases, medication use, disability, and other indicators of health status. We examine how changes in health interact with demographic and socioeconomic processes over time, generating new insights into the dynamics of morbidity, disability, and mortality within and between populations.

Methodological innovation is another cornerstone of the Laboratory's research. Addressing emerging challenges in population health requires new analytical tools capable of capturing increasingly complex demographic and epidemiological processes. We therefore develop novel methods, models, and measures for the analysis of health and mortality, including new approaches to measuring biological and demographic aging, analyzing disability dynamics, decomposing demographic change, forecasting health and mortality, visualizing demographic data, and strengthening causal inference in demographic research.

Across all research areas, the Laboratory aims to identify the demographic, behavioral, and structural conditions that enable populations to achieve long and healthy lives while reducing inequalities in health. By uncovering the causal pathways linking social conditions, health behaviors, and population health outcomes, our research contributes to the design and evaluation of evidence-based policies. At the same time, our forecasting models provide insights into the future burden of morbidity and disability under different demographic, policy, and medical scenarios, supporting long-term planning for sustainable health and welfare systems.