News

The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science will host a Hilary Term seminar featuring Aja Sutton, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Population Research Center at Portland State University. Her talk, titled “Online interactions, real-world epidemics: how digital social media influencers can affect epidemics in group-structured populations” will explore how online influence can shape health behaviours and epidemic outcomes. The seminar will take place on Tuesday 17th March 14:00-15:30 in the Butler Room at Nuffield College.

Jakub Bijak, Professor of Demographic Science at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS), is featured in a recent Financial Times article examining how demographic trends are reshaping the global economy.

For International Women's Day 2026, Nuffield College is delighted to host a talk from Professor Melinda Mills: How to Be Brilliant Without Being Behaved. The talk will take place on Monday 16th March from 17:30 at Nuffield College.

Five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an important question remains: was COVID-19 a short-lived mortality shock, or has it more permanently altered life expectancy trajectories? A new preprint by LCDS Deputy Director Jennifer Dowd and LCDS affiliates Antonino Polizzi, José Manuel Aburto, Hannaliis Jaadla, Haohao Lei, and Ridhi Kashyap, along with co-lead author Jonas Schöley from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, updates life expectancy estimates through 2024 for 34 high-income countries.

The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI) are pleased to welcome Anna Dimitrova, postdoctoral researcher at ISGlobal, Barcelona, for a guest lecture on “Climate Shocks, Child Nutrition, and the Role of Social Policy in Building Resilience.” The lecture will take place on Monday 9th March at 16:15 in the Lecture Theatre at Nuffield College.

Researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) have released a new working paper examining mortality patterns in the intersex population, the first study of its kind to address this topic using large-scale registry data.

A new opinion piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) argues that recent cuts to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program have created a profound crisis in global population data — but also an opportunity to rebuild a more equitable and sustainable system.

Researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS), Oxford Population Health at the University of Oxford, working with colleagues from the Pandemic Sciences Institute and international partners, have proposed a groundbreaking new approach to pandemic preparedness: experimental “epigames” that combine behavioural science, network analysis and digital technology to better understand how infectious diseases spread through real-world social networks.

The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize for outstanding PhD work in the area interdisciplinary demographic research.