2025 IUSSP Early Career AwardsOnline, 12 May 2025
REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND THE 2025 IUSSP EARLY CAREER AWARDS CEREMONY!
The IUSSP is proud to announce the awardees for the 2025 IUSSP Early Career Awards.
 Early Career Awardee, Africa: Dr. Nurudeen Alhassan holds a PhD in Population Studies from the Regional Institute of Population Studies at the University of Ghana and is currently a Senior Research and Policy Analyst at the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP). Nurudeen’s research interests are broadly in the intersections of population dynamics, health including sexual and reproductive health, gender, environment/climate change and development in Africa. He has extensive experience in conducting population-based quantitative and qualitative research, evidence synthesis, packaging and communicating evidence, policy engagement and capacity building of policymakers and researchers. Nurudeen was an IUSSP Fellow for the Project on Family Planning, Fertility and Urban Development. Nurudeen decided early on in his career not to follow the path of many African Demographers to focus almost entirely on research, but rather, to actively pursue research and work which is aimed at incorporating evidence use in policy formulation and implementation. He has been key in the work that AFIDEP has carried out across Africa advancing evidence use in population and development policy formulation and implementation.
 Early Career Awardee, Asia and the Pacific region: Dr. Luca Maria Pesando received his Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and is currently Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University-AD (NYU-AD, UAE). He is a demographer and sociologist with an interdisciplinary background spanning demography, economics, sociology, international development, education, global health, computational social science, and public policy. Over the past seven years, he has been at the forefront of global comparative research in the areas of family change, educational change, and digital connectivity. Perhaps most well-known is his work exploring global changes in families. As a leader of the Global Family Change project, he was among the first scholars to explore whether and, if so, how families are changing comparatively across over 80 LMICs. As a scholar working on global social issues across low- and middle-income countries, he also aims to make his work accessible to broader audiences by leveraging non-academic channels and disseminate the policy-relevance of his findings by connecting to scholars, practitioners, and government representatives across LMICs.
 Early Career Awardee, Europe: Dr. Diego Alburez-Gutierrez currently leads the Kinship Inequalities Research Group at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Germany. He has made important contributions to population studies through his work on kinship demography and his global approach to understanding demographic processes. His research utilizes insights from kinship theory to study demographic processes from a global perspective. For his PhD, Diego conducted extended fieldwork in Guatemala to quantify the impact of genocidal violence on family networks, developing novel methodological tools. Subsequently, his work leveraged methods from formal and computational demography to document inequalities in kinship patterns and kin loss worldwide. Diego has also used his skills for the benefit of the demographic community. He led the software development of two R-language packages, ‘DemoKin’ and ‘rsocsim’ facilitating the implementation of demographic models to study kinship dynamics globally, even in data-scarce environments. As a strong advocate of Open Science, Diego consistently shares the data and code from his publications on openly-accessible platforms like GitHub. As a mentor and educator, Diego encourages global exchange through his teaching and leadership across continents.
 Early Career Awardee, Latin America and the Caribbean: Dr. Igor Cavallini Johansen is a professor in the Department of Demography at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, and a researcher at the Elza Berquó Center for Population Studies (NEPO), also based at UNICAMP. He earned his PhD in 2018, with his dissertation focusing on the sociodemographic and environmental factors influencing dengue epidemics in Brazilian urban areas. Following his PhD, he completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of São Paulo, where he investigated how population mobility contributes to the spread of malaria in high-risk areas of the Brazilian Amazon. During his second postdoctoral position, at UNICAMP, he spent three years examining the social and environmental impacts of large hydroelectric dams’ construction in the Amazon, with particular emphasis on public health and food insecurity. Dr. Johansen’s research portfolio includes 36 articles published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals and three book chapters. Until the end of 2024, he served as co-editor of the Brazilian Journal of Population Studies (REBEP), the leading journal in the field of demography in Brazil. Additionally, from 2019 to 2021, he was a member of the inaugural IUSSP Early Career Taskforce.
 Early Career Awardee, North America: Dr. Monica Alexander is an Associate Professor in Statistics and Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods to help measure disparities in demographic and health outcomes and is recognized as a leader in the field of statistical and computational demography. She has led some of the first research to show the utility of social media data to produce migration estimates in the time of crises. Additionally, work led by Monica was the first to highlight the rapidly increasing levels of opioid mortality in the black population in the United States. She has also worked extensively with UN organizations on improving statistical estimation to track progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Monica is a gifted educator and has developed extensive and rigorous training material in Demography, Applied Statistics, and specialty areas including Bayesian statistics and reproducible research. Finally, she maintains a list of active women scholars in Demography, with the goal of increasing visibility of scholarly work by women and other gender minorities. 2025 Jury:
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The IUSSP Early Career Awards were established in 2023 to acknowledge and honour outstanding contributions to the development of our discipline and the broad field of population studies by early career scholars in the various regions of the world and boost the global visibility of their achievements.
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