Prof. Raya Muttarak, University of Bologna
Raya Muttarak is currently professor of Demography and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna. She has also been director of Population, Environment, and Sustainable Development at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2017. In 2022, she was appointed editor of the journal, Population and Development Review. Muttarak holds an MSc and DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford, UK, and pursued her postdoctoral research at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, winning first the Max Weber fellowship, followed by the Marie Curie Intra-European Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses mainly on the reciprocal relationship between population and the environment. Her current research projects include differential impacts of climate variability on human health, migration, and child welfare; climate change attitudes, voting patterns, and environmental behaviors; and modeling and forecasting future vulnerability and adaptive capacity. She is also actively engaged in empirical studies on a variety of topics ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic and gender disparities, estimates of migration intention to female empowerment, and domestic violence. She has published widely in the field of population dynamics, environment, and sustainable development, including publications in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, The Lancet, and Global Environmental Change.

Prof. Ridhi Kashyap, University of Oxford
Prof. Kashyap’s research spans different areas of demography, including questions linked to mortality and population health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity. They have worked on the demographic manifestations and implications of son preference as one of the most striking ways in which gender inequality interacts with demographic behaviours. In the areas of family demography, I have been studying the relationship between educational expansion, gender norms, and marriage and partnership patterns in different contexts. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have worked on different aspects of the social and demographic impacts of the pandemic, including topics such as the pandemic’s mortality impacts in cross-national perspective and the role of trust in science for public health. A central interest of their research has been to leverage computational approaches for demographic research within the growing area of Digital and Computational Demography, and forge links between demography and a growing interdisciplinary community of computational social science. Within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, they co-lead the strand on Digital and Computational Science. From a methodological standpoint, they are interested in how computational methods (e.g agent-based models, microsimulation, machine learning) and new data streams (e.g digital trace data from the web and social media), can contribute to the study of population dynamics and social inequalities. An example of this is provided on www.digitalgendergaps.org, where we use social media data together with survey data to nowcast global digital gender inequalities in internet and mobile access, a global sustainable development goal (SDG) indicator for which there is a significant data gap. From a substantive standpoint, they are interested in the impacts of mobile and internet technologies, and digitalisation more broadly, on demographic and sustainable development outcomes, such as gender inequalities, population health and empowerment.