News

An early look at the University of Oxford’s National Conversation research was shared at a Parliament event exploring how communities across the UK can live well together. The event at the House of Commons brought together researchers, policymakers, community organisations and representatives from across public life.

Researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science celebrated a successful British Society for Population Studies (BSPS) 2026 Conference at the University of Kent in Canterbury, with LCDS researchers receiving two poster prizes.

A new study led by researchers at Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science has provided the first detailed picture of the health, lifestyle and disease patterns of participants in Our Future Health, a UK-wide research programme that is building the largest health data resource of its kind in the country.

Dr Thomas Rawson, Senior Researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, has been appointed a Fellow of JUNIPER (the Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research network), joining five other early-career researchers in the scheme's 2026 cohort. The two-year fellowship supports emerging epidemic modellers in building research leadership, expanding cross-institutional collaborations, and developing science communication skills.

Sleep patterns differ more between individuals at risk of psychosis, and between individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, than they do between healthy individuals, according to new research led by researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, with colleagues at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry, and the Digital Psychiatry Unit at Harvard Medical School.

Between 2011 and 2019, England & Wales saw slower life expectancy gains than other European countries, slipping down in international rankings. New LCDS research explores what was going on underneath this life expectancy divergence. The study, published in Population Studies, was led by former LCDS PhD student Antonino Polizzi, with Andrea M. Tilstra, Luyin Zhang, and Jennifer Beam Dowd. It asks which age groups and causes of death drove the widening life expectancy gap between England & Wales and 20 other high-income countries.

A new study shows how digital trace data can be combined with traditional surveys to produce more detailed estimates of migrant populations by age and sex. The research, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, was co-authored by former Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science researcher Francesco Rampazzo and LCDS researcher Jakub Bijak, alongside Agnese Vitali, Ingmar Weber and Emilio Zagheni.

New research published in Annals of Epidemiology examines why educational inequalities in life expectancy tend to be larger among men than among women — and how much of this difference can be explained by smoking, alcohol and obesity. The study, co-authored by LCDS researcher Daniel Zazueta-Borboa, analysed data from England and Wales, Finland, and Turin, Italy, covering trends from the early 1970s to 2017. The researchers focused on remaining life expectancy at age 30, comparing people with high and low levels of education.