The winners of the Allianz European Demographer Award 2019 are Ridhi Kasyhap from Oxford University and Bruno Arpino from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
In the first category, the Junior Award, the PhD must have been completed within the last five years. In the second category, the Senior Award, it should have been completed ten to fifteen years ago. The award is to promote the most promising talents from the younger generation in demography.
The winner in the first category, Ridhi Kashyap, received her degree in social sciences from Harvard University, USA, and her doctorate at the European Doctoral School of Demography at Oxford University. A short time later she was appointed to one of the highly sought-after positions as Associate Professor. Many of her previous publications are considered groundbreaking. Among other things, she deals with the demographic consequences of gender preferences in families before and after birth and the resulting differences in the chances of survival between the sexes. Above all, however, in her research she turns to a new, but methodically difficult form of data. Namely, the data traces that we all leave on the Internet every day, for example when using Google. Big Data is still largely methodological new territory in the social sciences.
The winner in the Senior Award category is Bruno Arpino. He is one of the most productive scientists of his generation. Nearly 30 articles in prestigious scientific journals over the past decade, more than half of them as lead authors, speak for themselves. He deals with a wide range of demographic issues, from the socio-economic and demographic effects of grandparent involvement and the partnership-based distribution of tasks within families, up to and including differences in the way immigrants and the host population perceive their own life situation. He is known for a high degree of scientific precision and a high degree of methodological reliability. But he is not only an excellent researcher. If science nowadays involves more cooperation than during my time, when the lone warfare still prevailed, then Bruno Arpino is certainly one of the protagonists of a networked and cooperative science within demography.
The awards were handed out in the light of the opening of the Berliner Demografie Forum 2019 in Berlin. Among the guests and speakers were Wolfgang Schäuble, President of the German Bundestag, and former German Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Franz Müntefering.
Fotos: Gesine Born