05 December 2016 - 07 December 2016
Vienna, Austria

Variations of the themes of Wolfgang Lutz

In honor of World Population Program (POP) Director Wolfgang Lutz' 60th birthday, the Wittgenstein Centre and its three pillars, IIASA, the VID at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business, are hosting this scientific conference.

Wolfgang Lutz at the Wittgenstein Centre Symposium 2015 © VID

Wolfgang Lutz at the Wittgenstein Centre Symposium 2015 © VID

Since 1984 at IIASA, Lutz has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projection, and the interaction between population and environment. Together with his colleagues at POP, he has been expanding demographic methods to make them more relevant for the analysis of contemporary global policy challenges. In particular, the group has operationalized the methods of multi-dimensional population dynamics by level of highest educational attainment for all countries in the world and produced, through this, the “human core” of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)—the new future scenarios broadly agreed by the global environmental change research community.

Lutz is author and editor of 28 books and more than 200 refereed articles, including seven in "Science" and "Nature". In 2008 he received an ERC Advanced Grant, in 2009 the Mattei Dogan Award of the IUSSP, and in 2010 the Wittgenstein Prize. With the latter he founded the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), a collaboration between IIASA, the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU).

Lutz has carried out a series of world population projections produced at IIASA and has developed approaches for projecting education and human capital. The latest set of population projections was put together by researchers at POP in collaboration with colleagues at the Wittgenstein Centre based on the broadest ever international review about what we know today about the drivers of fertility, mortality, migration, and education in different parts of the world and what we can assume for the future. It was published in 2014 in a massive volume with 1056 pages entitled “World Population and Human Capital in the 21st Century” (eds. W. Lutz, W. Butz and Samir KC) and the Wittgenstein Centre Data Explorer. This effort includes projection results for all countries in the world by age, sex and level of education and is currently likely the most comprehensive assessment of the global state of knowledge about future population and human capital trends. 

This conference will look at the major themes that Wolfgang Lutz has contributed to during his career. IIASA Director General and CEO Pavel Kabat, Anton Zeilinger, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Stefan Pichler, Vice-Rector at the WU, will give a short portrait of Wolfgang’s history and achievements at the respective institution. Former collaborators, including Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi (Australian National University and University of Tehran), Philip Rees (University of Leeds), William Butz (Former President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau), Francesco Billari (University of Oxford), Joel E. Cohen (The Rockefeller University), and Frans Willekens (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute), will discuss the impact of Lutz' work in the scientific field of demography. Current and long term colleagues from IIASA and the Wittgenstein Centre will focus on more recent scientific achievements.

Event details:

Variations of the themes of Wolfgang Lutz

Date: 5-7 December 2016

Location: Campus WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Building LC, Ceremonial Hall 1, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Registration&Information: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/events/calendar/conferences/registration-form/

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Last edited: 06 December 2016

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