The Born Once - Die Once project starts from a novel premise: birth and death, while opposite in nature, may share deeper connections than previously recognized. The key insight? Just as we only die once, each child is also born only once. This simple observation unlocks a powerful new framework to explore joint regularities in birth and death patterns and envisions a transdisciplinary theory across scales. The implications span from understanding human aging to improving population forecasts in our rapidly changing world.
Press
Silvio successfully defended his PhD on December 5th. His thesis title was "Senescent Mortality: Estimates for Populations and Individuals".
The award recognizes outstanding research on the causes and consequences of demographic change in Europe. It honors early-career researchers whose work is at the frontier of anthropological, biological, economic, historical, mathematical, political, sociological, or statistical population studies.
The fellowship recognizes emerging researchers with extraordinary potential and provides financial support as well as access to an excellent network of researchers pursuing ambitious, world-class research over the next three years.
Cosmo Strozza as Guest Editor for Genus, Journal of Population Sciences of a Thematic Collection on Healthy Life Expectancy: New Methods, New Insights.
Paola successfully defended her PhD on June 16th. Her thesis title was Mortality á la mode.
Ainhoa successfully defended her PhD on June 13th. Her thesis title was Short-term mortality forecasting: Methods and demographic applications.
Serena successfully defended her PhD on August 27th. Her thesis title was Mortality Inequalities in Crises and Living Arrangements in Europe.
Florian successfully defended his PhD on June 18th. His thesis title was Effectiveness of COVID-19 interventions: How individuals shaped the pandemic and how the pandemic shaped individuals".
Our Jes Søgaard was awarded a prize from Fonden En God Start på Livet for his research and information about births and in particular safety and other outcomes related to different birth places (at home, midwife clinic outside hospital, clinic at hospital, or birth ward at hospital). Congratulations for this important contribution.
The Latin American Population Association's Network of Projections and Demographic Data Production (ProDatos) is organizing a workshop to address the challenges faced in demographic data collection and analysis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has significantly affected fertility, mortality, and migration trends in Latin America, while also disrupting scheduled population censuses and the recording of birth and death registration records. The workshop aims to discuss these issues, share lessons learned, and provide training on techniques for evaluating and analyzing population data using R software, particularly in scenarios of incomplete data. The event is a response to the urgent need for robust, timely, and geographically disaggregated demographic data for effective population estimates and projections.
Events
We will finally have a Master programme in Population Studies in Denmark! And it will be taught at CPop! Spread the news and invite new prospective students to start with us in September 2024. The students will acquire a unique education and skillset which fuses social sciences, quantitative methods and programming. They will graduate with the competences to understand contemporary population challenges and be equipped with tools necessary for finding solutions
The kick-off event ‘Dansk Demografisk Dag’ to relaunch the Dansk Demografisk Forening is approaching. The event will take place on Friday, April 28th, 2023 in Odense. Through presentations and panel debate, it will cover different aspects of population dynamics in Denmark and open a discussion about future Danish demographic research.
Thanks to initiative of CPop researchers the Danish Demographic Society (Dansk Demografisk Forening) is alive again after several years of inactivity. The society plans to promote networking and knowledge exchange among people interested in various aspects of population dynamics in Denmark, foster a policy relevant debate, and strengthen the ties with our partners in the Nordic Demographic Association. The General Assembly elected Silvia Rizzi, CPop Assistant Professor, as the new Chair of the Society.
Our Jes Søgaard is among the most cited experts in Danish media as no. 7 in 2022. Jes commented most often in the area of public health and Covid-19 pandemic policies. It is remarkable that among the top 50 most cited experts were just three women and 47 men.
Our paper was among the Top 10 most read articles in BMJ Open in the past months and widely cited by the media. The shifted perspective showing that a non-negligeable proportion of men outlive females caught attention as novel and surprising to some. The paper ‘Probability of males to outlive females: an international comparison from 1751 to 2020’ led by our Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher measures sex differences in lifespan based on the probability of males to outlive females
Publications
Life in a violent country can be years shorter and much less predictable – even for those not involved in conflict. Violent deaths are responsible for a high proportion of the differences in lifetime uncertainty between violent and peaceful countries according to a new study from an international team, led by our José Manuel Aburto and published in Science Advances.
Jim Oeppen decided to leave for his retirement. We knew this time is coming and we are happy for him to be returning closer to his family but nevertheless his expertise, scientific rigor, and simply his personality will be missed. This moment certainly deserves a special celebration. On Friday January 20 at 10am CET, join us for a special CPop seminar celebrating Jim Oeppen’s scientific and personal contributions.
Yesterday, during a festive ceremony, José Manuel Aburto was awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. It is a prestigious prize for outstanding young researchers in Denmark awarded to one person every year.
In a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, Jonas Schöley, José Manuel Aburto, Ilya Kashnitsky and colleagues used data on deaths from 29 countries between 2015 and 2021 to estimate changes in life expectancy. They find that in many of the countries assessed, life expectancy returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, but several — including the US, Chile and countries in Eastern Europe — continued to see a fall in life expectancy.
Jose Manuel Aburto and his cutting-edge research into global health and inequality awarded with a Silver Medal of the The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. The Silver Medal is awarded once a year to a Danish researcher under the age of 40 for a particularly significant thesis or overall scientific effort.
As of October 1st, Annette Baudisch became the new Director of CPop. Annette is a mathematician and demographer by training with insights into biology, economics, and computer science. Her research advances concepts, theories, and methods in the field of age-patterns of mortality and fertility. Previously she has been CPop’s Deputy Director for Research. She takes over from Jes Søgaard, who remains a researcher at the Centre.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy among several racial and ethnic groups shifted, severely reducing Hispanic life expectancy and further widening the persistent gap between Black and White populations, a study by our José Manuel Aburto and co-authors finds.
Women live longer than men — this is one of the main regularities of human mortality. Well known. Yet, we are too focused on the averages — 25-50% of individual men outsurvive a randomly paired woman. Check out a new paper by our Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher, Ilya Kashnitsky, Virginia Zarulli and co-author, published in BMJ Open.
Ryohei Mogi is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics (CPop), University of Southern Denmark. He is a demographer and seeks to understand the fertility decline and family changes by developing alternative measures and analysing the key factors of such decline and changes and its consequences. He particularly focuses on childlessness, mate search, and partnership formation.
Alexander is an economist interested in the dynamics of healthcare expenditure and their joint relationship with health and aging trends. His research applies and develops econometric and machine learning methods.
New ‘World Population Prospects 2022’ of the United Nations are published. Our Ilya Kashnitsky is commenting on its content for DR.
Humans can’t, but turtles can reduce weakening and deterioration with age. Evolutionary theories of ageing predict that all living organisms weaken and deteriorate with age and eventually die. Certain animal species, such as turtles and tortoises, may exhibit slower or even absent senescence when their living conditions improve. Check out this groundbreaking work in Science by our colleagues Fernando Colchero, Dalia A. Conde, Annette Baudisch and our former colleagues Rita Da Silva.
We invite you to join us on May 2nd in Odense or through online broadcasting in remembering James W. Vaupel’s contribution to science, scientific community and to nurturing young talents. Through personal memories of colleagues, students, and friends, the event will be a celebration of James W. Vaupel’s living legacy.
On Sunday 27 March 2022, Jim Vaupel died following an unexpected and brief illness. Thus, our university and Denmark, indeed the whole world, lost a leading demographer and researcher on ageing.
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Dr James W. Vaupel (2 May 1945 - 27 March 2022), founding Director of our Centre and a towering figure in demographic research. All of us who had the privilege of collaborating with him will remember him as a visionary researcher, academic teacher, and engaged supervisor, full of enthusiasm, inspiration, and care for his people. He was a great colleague and a reliable friend, but most of all, one of the great demographers of our time. We work to continue his legacy.
The prestigious grant awarded by the European Research Council for five years will allow Annette Baudisch to establish a research team and to explore new patterns in fertility data. In her project, Annette sets about testing how the methods of mortality modelling can be used in modelling general patterns of fertility. Congratulation to Annette for the great achievement!
Our Ainhoa Leger and Silvia Rizzi won the prize with their paper entitled ‘Estimating excess mortality in French and Spanish regions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: An application of the later/earlier method’. They found that although both France and Spain reported similar numbers of confirmed COVID-19 deaths, Spain recorded a higher excess death risk. The results confirm differences in COVID-19 vulnerability for population subgroups and spatial areas: adults aged 75–85 were the hardest hit; Île-de-France in France and Comunidad de Madrid in Spain registered the highest excess mortality. Applicable to other demographic phenomena, the later/earlier method is simple, requires fewer assumptions than other forecasting methods, and is less biased and more accurate than the 5-year average method. Their paper will be published in the journal Population this month. It is the first paper for Ainhoa Leger a fresh PhD student at CPop with James Vaupel as the main supervisor and Silvia Rizzi as the co-supervizor.
In the authors lead by our Serena Vigezzi investigate lifespan variation trends around various mortality crises, focusing on age-specific contributions and sex differences. They offer new insight into the consequences of mortality crises. Contrary to what is often asserted, they show that the choice of lifespan variation indicator is not always inconsequential when mortality increases significantly. The paper was published in Demographic research.
It has been almost four years since CPop was established so it is time to look back and check how we have been doing! Read about our research achievements and highlights, organization, publications, future plans and much more.
The order is given to outstanding citizens of the Danish state for contributions to science, art, business, civil and military service by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (The Royal Order of Dannebrog).
Dalia received the award for her inspiring work on nature conservation, where she has participated in the work of launching 'The Conservation Science Alliance' which brings together researchers, zoos, aquariums and international nature conservation organisations with the common goal of saving species from extinction.
Jesús successfully defended his PhD on October 29th. His thesis title was ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives on human longevity’.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered life expectancy losses not seen since World War II in Western Europe and exceeded those observed around the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in central and Eastern European countries. Nordic Europe, with the exception of Sweden, have seen less dramatic impact of COVID-19 however. A new comparative study by our researchers and co-authors from Oxford University documents the unprecedented life expectancy change by sex and broad age groups published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Welfare states mainly redistribute resources between age groups (from those who work to those who do not). Their impact on leveling off socio-economic status inequalities is much smaller in comparison. Pieter Vanhuysse and co-authors remind us that poverty alleviation and inequality mitigation potential is explicitly or implicitly part of most government interventions and that social policies should not be the sole ones that shoulder the blame for imperfect result.
Check out Pieter’s piece ‘The Truth about Life, Sung Like a Lie: Dylan’s Timeless Arrows from Consolation Row’.
Check out the paper ‘Estimating the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales: a population-level analysis.
Virginia Zarulli talks about the gender differences in the length of life and its possible causes. They are both biological and social. Biology gives women about two additional years of life, on average, compared to men, sais Virginia. Additional differences are probably of social nature.
The team has found that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints. Life expectancy has increased dramatically and still does in many parts of the world. But this is not because we have slowed our rate of aging; the reason is that more and more infants, children and young people survive and this brings up the average life expectancy.
An intriguing summary of today's World challenges brain-picking on excellent scientists. Pieter is the sole non-US based academic cited together with prominent researchers such as D. Acemoglu, J. Sachs, or J. Goldstone.
The model has many advantages, but tends to underpredict life expectancy due to its assumption of constant age-specific response to the time index. Does this bias emerge from all ages or from specific ages only? Learn more in a paper by our Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher and Søren Kjærgaard published in the Scandinavian Actuarial Journal.
It shows sex differences, and differences among subspecies. The paper also shows the importance of demographic data on zoo-housed animals for understanding reproductive patterns and right conservation efforts targeting.
Check out a fresh paper of our Virginia Zarulli, Ilya Kashnitsky and James Vaupel in PNAS.
New research of our Maarten Wensink and Linda Ahrenfeldt "The link between fertility and longevity " covered by The Conversation. Their study found that the longer it took a person to conceive, the poorer their health was in later life. How important is the role of environmental and genetic factors in this link? The authors answer this question by using the Danish twin registry data.
Countries such as the Netherlands, Estonia, Denmark and Finland have implemented reforms that link retirement age to changes in life expectancy. What does this type of policy mean for different socio-economic groups? In their new paper focusing on Denamrk, Jesús-Adrián Alvarez with co-authors conclude that linking retirement age to life expectancy increases uncertainty about length of life after retirement. They also conclude that males from lower socio-economic groups are at the greatest disadvantage, because they spend fewer years in retirement, pay higher pension costs per year of expected benefits and are exposed to higher longevity risk than the rest of the population. Inequalities in longevity have a big impact in pension schemes. Therefore, policy makers should consider them when setting retirement ages.
In their paper Silvia Rizzi and James Vaupel introduce a simple but powerful method for analyzing mortality after a major shock. Their method makes short-term forecasts of the number of deaths that would have occurred if the coronavirus pandemic or other health catastrophe had not occurred. They apply the method to show, more conclusively than up to now, that Denmark, which imposed a lockdown during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, suffered considerably lower risks of death than Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown.
Julia successfully defended her PhD on April 8th. Her thesis title was ‘Effects of the 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic on Infectious Disease Prevention in Guinea’.
Read some thoughts on maternity leave and academia by our Virginia Zarulli in the Science Magazine
Congratulations to our José Manuel Aburto who has been honoured with the European Demographer Award for his outstanding contribution to research on lifespan inequalities. A fresh PhD graduate from CPop (2020, main supervisor James Vaupel), José Manuel has an impressive number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, including as lead author in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, Population Studies and Demographic Research. The awarding ceremony for the European Demographer Award will be held on March 22 during the Berlin Demography Days, in the presence of Dubravka Šuica, the Vice President of the European Commission.
Frederikke successfully defended her PhD thesis on the 5th of March at the University of Southern Denmark. Her thesis title was ‘Essays in Health and Demographic Economics’.
Cosmo successfully defended his PhD thesis on 25 February at the School of Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome and in Public Health at the Graduate School of Public Health at SDU. His thesis topic was ‘Understanding health dynamics among the oldest-old’.
Check out the blog post 'Automating care: the devaluation of care work for the elderly in the name of gender equality' by our Ella Fegitz
Due to increasing age at paternity and prescription trends in general, future fathers use many drugs increasingly before conception. Some of these drugs have been linked to sperm damage. Any effect on offspring health is still unclear. To figure out what any cross-generational effects are is an important direction of future research. Check out this new paper of our Maarten Wensink, Silvia Rizzi, Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen and co-authors.
An easy -to-read paper with four nice examples of why the mean does not say it all, and when variability around the mean can change conclusions. A new paper by our Maarten Wensink, Linda Ahrenfeldt and a co-author.
Anne is a historian and postdoc in the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies. Her research focuses on the modern history of health care and health politics.
Now and again we see evidence of adverse effects of epidemics on lifespan disparity especially for the disadvantaged and minority groups. Check out a new study on the effects of HIV/AIDS epidemics on the lifespan disparity and life expectancy for the US Black vs White population by our José Manuel Aburto, Frederikke Frehr Kristensen, and Paul Sharp.
New article about progress in longevity in the past and future. Our James Vaupel, Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher and Francisco Villavicencio address an essential question of how much can human lifespan be extended.
The Programme will support her research on how do health interventions during the childhood translate into better health and earnings in adulthood.
Our José Manuel Aburto, Jonas Schoeley and co-authors published a paper in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showing the impact of excess mortality during the COVID19 pandemic on the life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales. Their estimates of sex-specific excess mortality risk and deaths suggest that life expectancy at birth dropped 0.9 and 1.2 years for females and males relative to the 2019 levels, respectively. Lifespan inequality also fell over the same period by five months for both sexes. Their findings were widely covered by media.
Trifon specializes in stochastic models of mortality, especially frailty models, in biostatistics, and in forecasting. His imminent research focuses on developing novel forecasting methods of mortality using ancillary knowledge about steady relationships among mortality measures.
During his stay, he will focus on researching the welfare state as an inter-age project and on theoretical and methodological aspects of National Transfer Accounts
The research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy in England and Wales was covered by The Guardian yesterday. The main highlighted finding is that life expectancy at birth dropped 0.9 and 1.2 years for females and males during the 2020 pandemic relative to the same period in 2019. Our José Manuel Aburto and Jonas Schöley carried out the research together with colleagues from University in Oxford and Sheffield.
More than 20 years of research about the oldest-old is compiled in the recently published monograph “Exceptional Lifespans” edited by our James Vaupel and colleagues with contributions of many CPop affiliates. The advance of the frontier of survival is documented, verified, and brought to life in this monograph. A dedicated international team gathered data on supercentenarians, aged 110+, in 12 European countries, Japan, Quebec and the United States and analysed longevity and survival using cutting edge analytical tools and theories to unveil the secrets of how long can humans live.
Pieter’s project will focus on one of today’s Grand Challenges: how to build more sustainable societies with more intergenerationally just policies. The aim is theoretically informed and rigorously policy-oriented: to measure and compare intergenerational justice in policy practice across 32 democracies: Denmark, its Nordic neighbors, the EU's big three economies (Germany, France and Italy), and the OECD world. Contextually, the project will touch on important contemporary questions of policy sustainability, societal resilience and good governance, related to SDGs 1, 4, 10, 13, and 16.
New paper and dataset in which we collated and synthesized information on 1,226 Elasmobranch species (i.e. sharks, rays, and skates) globally. We retrieved, curated and standardized data from many sources so they can serve further research on in-situ and ex-situ population management for sharks and batoids. Our data can be of use to international policy makers, aquarium curators, management authorities, conservation practitioners, and scientists interested in prioritizing Elasmobranchs for conservation. The team includes our Rita da Silva, Johanna Staerk, John Jackson, Dalia A. Conde.
Authored by our Silvia Rizzi, MaartenWensink, Rune Lindahl Jacobsen and others.
CPop Professor James Vaupel, received a research grant to study consequences of Covid-19 related mortality. He and his team will produce estimates of death directly and indirectly attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The focus will be on analyzing daily excess mortality and to produce estimates of how many life-years were lost by those dying directly or indirectly from Covid-19.
We have great news to share, as a new master’s programme in Population Studies is going to open at CPop in Odense. It is Denmark’s first education programme with a focus on demography and population dynamics and its application – knowledge that is crucial for society in relation to ensuring sound public and private decissions. The programme is in English and will welcome its first students in Autumn 2024. Stay tuned for more details.
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