Directory Profile

After receiving a PhD in Demography from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was trained in formal demographic methods, I obtained a research position at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris, France where I led a research group (unité de recherche "Population et Développement"), with the analysis of mortality change as one of its main research orientations. Since 2006, I have had a joint position with the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, sharing my time between Paris and California. Over the past twenty years, I have been working in various capacities for the Human Mortality Database (HMD) project. First published in 2002, the HMD is an open-access database with uniformly constructed series of mortality rates and life tables for 41 countries, which has become a worldwide reference for mortality research, with over 70,000 registered users and more than 5,500 scientific peer-reviewed publications citing HMD data as a main source of statistical information. Meanwhile, I have maintained an active research career, presenting papers at scientific conferences on a regular basis and publishing a series of notable articles in top demography and other internationally ranked journals, while periodically teaching classes at the Graduate level at the EDSD and at the University of California, Berkeley.