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.
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
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.
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.
Publications
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.
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.
Events
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The Programme will support her research on how do health interventions during the childhood translate into better health and earnings in adulthood.
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.
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.
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