News

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. 

A study led by Dr Jasmin Abdel Ghany, and including several LCDS associated researchers, provides new evidence that 
rising temperatures can influence the sex ratio at birth, with important implications for population health and gender 
balance in a warming world.

Two new publications by Dr Mary Roberts (Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science) shed new light on how social inequalities shape the experiences of people living with kidney disease in the United States — from long-term treatment pathways to donor’s willingness to donate.

Two recent publications by Sander Wagner (Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science) provide new evidence on how becoming a mother affects women’s careers, and why these effects matter for gender inequality more broadly. Both studies draw on large-scale administrative labour market data from France and Germany that were harmonised by the authoring team under a DFG–ANR research grant, with the aim of making cross-national research using administrative records more feasible.

A new pre-print by LCDS researchers Robert Campbell and Melinda Mills investigates the potential health side effects of drugs that target the GLP-1 receptor, a class of medications increasingly used to treat diabetes and obesity.

Dr. Joshua Wilde of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science was extensively quoted in a recent New York Times Headway newsletter examining declining birth rates across the United States and other high-income countries. The piece situates these trends within broader social and economic contexts, emphasising how decisions about whether, when, and how many children to have are shaped as much by structural conditions as by personal choice.

The LCDS will host a seminar by Dr Alejandro Espinosa-Rada, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO), KU Leuven (Belgium). The event will take place on Monday 16 February 2026, 2:00–3:00 pm in the Butler Room, Nuffield College.