News

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. 

We’re very excited to announce that Professor Jakub Bijak joins the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) as Professor of Demographic Science — in a joint appointment with Reuben College, University of Oxford — starting 1 February 2026. 

The LCDS will welcome Mahesh Venkat Karra, Associate Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, for an upcoming seminar exploring new experimental evidence on the wider impacts of family planning access on women and children’s lives. The seminar will take place in the Butler Room, Nuffield College, 2:00-3:00pm on Monday 9th February. 

We are delighted to announce the first seminar of the term in the LCDS seminar series, to be delivered by Professor Prabhat Jha, Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, on Tuesday 3 February at 2 pm. While a formal title for the seminar will be confirmed shortly, this event marks an important start to our academic programme for the Spring Term.

Mobile health technologies — from wearable sensors to symptom-tracking apps — promise a future where patients help shape the care they receive. A new narrative scoping review published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research examines how patient-generated health data (PGHD) collected through mobile health (mHealth) applications influences health care management and clinical decision-making for adults with long-term conditions.

A new study from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science reassesses whether rising gender equality can help reverse falling birth rates, a long-standing theory in demography. The research, published in Demographic Research, revisits a prominent 2019 study by Martin Kolk and offers fresh evidence that improvements in gender equality can lead to a modest fertility recovery, but only under specific conditions and not enough to counter broader declines.

A research team comprised of current and alumni members of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) has published a major new study in PNAS revealing where and to what extent women remain excluded from the digital world.

Philip Cohen, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, will deliver our final seminar of Michaelmas Term on Thursday 13th November 2:00-3:30pm, in the Butler Room at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Hi talk is titled Authoritarian Pronatalism and the Pyrrhic Defeat.