The Team
Prof Jakub Bijak
Jakub Bijak is Professor of Statistical Demography at the University of Southampton. He has background in economics and nearly 20 years of work experience in academia and international civil service. His research focuses on demographic uncertainty, population and migration models and forecasts, and the demography of armed conflict. For his work on migration modelling he has been awarded the Allianz European Demographer Award (2015) and the Jerzy Z Holzer Medal (2007). He currently he leads a European Research Council project “Bayesian agent-based population studies”, developing innovative simulation models of migration, and a Horizon 2020 project “QuantMig: Quantifying Migration Scenarios for Better Policy”, focused on various aspects of quantitative migration scenarios and forecasting (www.quantmig.eu).
Prof Marta Bivand Erdal
Marta Bivand Erdal is Research Director, and Research Professor in Migration Studies, at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). As a Human Geographer she is interested in the causes and consequences of migration and migrant transnationalism in both emigration and immigration contexts. This has led to research on remittances, migration and development; return mobilities; citizenship, nation and diversity; migration & religion; and the interactions of migrant integration and transnational ties. Marta's work draws on interview, focus group, and survey data, paying critical attention to the use of categories. Her empirical focus is on European and Asian contexts. She has published extensively in migration studies and regularly engages with governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.
Dr Rafael Costa
Rafael Costa is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and affiliated researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and University of Antwerp. He holds a Master's degree in Population Studies (2009) and a PhD in Social Sciences (2015) from the University of Louvain, Belgium. His research focuses on spatial demography, in particular the patterns of demographic change in space and time and the influence of space and networks on demographic behaviour and socioeconomic outcomes. He has applied this perspective in studies on fertility and family, internal and international migration, and residential segregation. Rafael's works mainly draw on quantitative methods, microlevel administrative data, and fine-grained spatial data.
Prof Mathias Czaika
Mathias Czaika is a Professor in Migration and Integration and Head of the Department for Migration and Globalization at Danube University Krems, Austria, and former director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He has got a PhD in Political Economy from University of Freiburg, Germany, and published widely on topics including international migration in the context of globalization, development, inequality, and conflict. His specific research interests include (i) drivers and dynamics of international migration processes; (ii) migration decision-making; (iii) migration policy formation and policy impacts; (v) migration of high-skilled workers, asylum seekers and refugees.
Prof Helga de Valk
Helga de Valk is theme leader 'Migration and Migrants' at NIDI and professor of Migration and the life course at the University of Groningen. She was awarded the PhD in sociology from Utrecht University (2006). Her research focuses on migration and integration issues, the transition to adulthood of immigrant youth, union and family formation, the second generation, segregation, and European mobility. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2010 FamiLife) and acquired an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018 MYMOVE). Furthermore she led and was part of a range of national and international projects funded amongst others by Horizon 2020 and Norface. She was editor in chief of the European Journal of Population (EJP; 2014-2018) and winner of the 2016 European Demography Award. She is currently president elect of the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS) and member of the Advisory Committee for Migration Affairs (ACVZ).
Prof Nico Keilman
Douglas Lewis
Douglas Lewis is the QuantMig Project Manager based at the University of Southampton, co-ordinating the administration services in delivering the project. He has a Masters in Operations Management from the University of Manchester. His background includes Programme Management roles in Defence, Engineering, Telecommunications and Construction. He has experienced migration at first hand whilst on Peace Keeping duties with the British Army on behalf of the United Nations in Bosnia and Africa.
Dr Michaela Potančoková
Michaela Potančoková is a demographer with research interests in multidimensional demography and population projections. She joined the World Population (POP) Program as a Research Scholar in June 2012 and returned to IIASA in January 2020, after having worked for three years for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. Her current research focuses on migration, global human capital and population change as well as religious demography. She has worked on numerous research projects, including with the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Potančoková earned her PhD from the Charles University in Prague in 2009. During the doctoral studies, she took part in the 2004/2005 Winter Semester Program at the International Max Planck Research School for Demography in Rostock, Germany, and received an RTN stipend at the Population Research Centre at the University of Groningen in 2005. Prior to joining IIASA, Dr. Potančoková worked as demographer in the Demographic Research Centre in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Prof Peter WF Smith
Professor Peter WF Smith is Professor of Social Statistics within Social Statistics & Demography at the University of Southampton. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Peter has worked at the University for over 25 years. He obtained a First Class BSc in Mathematics in 1986 from Lancaster University, and returned there to complete a PhD in Statistics in 1990, having obtained an MSc in Probability and Statistics with Distinction in 1987 from the University of Sheffield. Peter has research interests in developing new statistical methodology, including methods for handling non-response and for modelling longitudinal data, and applying sophisticated statistical methods to problems in demography, medicine and health sciences. His publications include articles in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, B and C, Biometrika and the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Peter was awarded the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 1999 and was Joint Editor of Series C of their Journal from 2013 to 2016.
Dr Daniela Vono de Vilhena
Dr. Daniela Vono de Vilhena is Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) since 2013 and Deputy Executive Secretary at Population Europe in Berlin. Before joining the MPIDR, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the European University Institute, Italy, at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and at Centre for Demographic Studies at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), where she obtained her PhD in Demography.
Prof Jackline Wahba
Professor Jackline Wahba is Professor of Economics at the University of Southampton. Jackie is an applied economist with an interest in the economics of international migration and labour markets. She has published extensively on the impact of international migration and has served as advisor for several international bodies and organisations.
Jackie is focusing on migration pull drivers and determinants of destination choice of European migration flows within the QuantMig Project.
Dr Georgios Aristotelous
Dr Georgios Aristotelous
University of Southampton
Georgios Aristotelous is a Research Fellow on the QuantMig research project based at the University of Southampton using Bayesian methods to estimate migration flows. His PhD thesis “Topics in Bayesian Inference and Model Assessment for Partially Observed Stochastic Epidemic Models” is concerned with the development of methods for efficient Bayesian inference (based on data augmentation) and model assessment (based on disease progression curves) for stochastic epidemic models. Georgios’ research interests are in the development and application of Bayesian methods in the areas of public health, biology, medicine and demography.
Dr Maryam Aslany
Maryam Aslany is an economic sociologist of international development and Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), working on 'Future Migration as Present Fact' (FUMI), an ERC project led by Professor Jřrgen Carling. Before joining PRIO, Maryam was a Career Development Researcher at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she worked on India's rural middle-class formation, and climate change adaptation in India's agrarian regions. Her research interests include patterns of global migration, climate induced migration and the political economy of climate change adaptation.
Dr Emily Barker
Emily Barker is a Research Fellow on the QuantMig research project based at the University of Southampton studying the uncertainty of migration across time horizons. Emily completed her PhD in Economics at The University of Sheffield in 2020. Her thesis "Essays on the Macroeconomics of Migration" evaluated the role of migration on the macroeconomy of open economies using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and structural vector autoregressions (SVAR). The research includes evaluation of brain waste in Canada and the relationship between the resource curse and migration with the use of occasionally binding migration policies. Emily's research interests are in the areas of international migration, business cycles, open economies, fiscal policy, emerging economies, commodity prices, and applied macroeconometrics.
Prof Alain Bélanger
Alain Bélanger is an associate professor at the Urbanization Culture Society Center of INRS.
He holds a BA in History (1982) and an MA in Demography from the University of Montreal (1986) as well as a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1990). Before becoming a professor at INRS, he worked for 17 years at Statistics Canada, where he held the positions of research and analysis coordinator in the Demography Division and deputy director of the Subjects Program. census subjects. He was editor of the Report on the State of the Population of Canada and director of the Cahiers québécois de démographie.
Prof Heidrun Bohnet
Heidrun Bohnet is Assistant Professor at the Department for Migration and Globalization at Danube University Krems, Austria. Previously, she worked at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and the Peace and Conflict Institute BICC in Bonn, Germany. She holds a PhD from the Department of Political Science and International Relations from the University of Geneva. Heidrun Bohnet has led and been involved in major data collection projects on forced migration, which have been published among others in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Conflict Management and Peace Science. Her main research centers on forced migration, settlement and free movement policies, drivers of migration, as well as violent conflict dynamics.
Dr Michaël Boissonneault
I, Michaël Boissonneault, currently work as postdoctoral researcher on a project about the transition to adulthood among millennials. I use time-to-event models and microsimulation to project change in life courses over time and how punctual events like the economic crisis impact them. I obtained my PhD degree in 2018 from the University of Groningen after having completed a thesis about the impact of aging and decline in health on the capacity of workers to postpone their retirement. My work was published in journals of different disciplines ranging from demography to public health.
Prof Halvard Buhaug
Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Associate Editor of Journal of Peace Research. His main research interests hover around security implications of climate change, including assessing the pathways through which extreme weather events affect conflict dynamics and the conditions under which such effects are most prominent. Recent publications have appeared in Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Politics, Nature, PNAS, and World Development.
Mathilde Bĺlsrud Mjelva
Mathilde Bĺlsrud Mjelva is a research assistant at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). She works fulltime on the QuantMig project where she compiles and analytically reviews survey instruments that cover migration aspirations and related concepts. Mathilde holds a master's degree in Political Science from the University of Oslo and submitted her thesis in June 2020, titled "Rainfall variability and violent, state-based conflict: A machine learning approach to estimate context specificity". Her research interests are migration and the climate-conflict nexus, with a special interest in machine learning.
Prof Jřrgen Carling
I am Research Professor in migration and transnationalism studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where I am part of the Migration research group. PRIO is an independent, international and interdisciplinary research institute. My staff page at PRIO contains more information about the research I am involved in.
My background in is human geography, which is a great foundation for doing migration research. I also draw heavily on work within other disciplines, including anthropology, economics and sociology.
I am based in Oslo with my wife Heidi Řstbř Haugen, who is also a geographer, and our two children. We have had the possibility of several long-term stays elsewhere, especially in our second home city, Guangzhou.
Dr Joop de Beer
Joop de Beer leads the Ageing & Longevity group at NIDI. His research interests include demographic projections and analyses of trends in migration, fertility and mortality. He received his PhD in Spatial Sciences from the University of Groningen. He has been member of NIDI's management team since 2004. Before 2004 he was employed by Statistics Netherlands where he was responsible for the Dutch population forecasts and population statistics. He coordinated various national and international research projects funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission. He has published articles about projections of life expectancy, estimation of migration flows, and time-series analyses of migration, mortality and fertility in various demographic and statistical journals.
Dr Valentina Di Iasio
Valentina Di Iasio is an applied economist. She is working with Jackie Wahba on WP3, which is focused on destination countries and aims at offering a better understanding of the drivers of immigration.
Before joining the QuantMig family she was a Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Bordeaux, where she also collaborated at the TKC project on high-skilled migration. She holds a PhD in Methods and Models for Economic Decisions from the University of Insubria. In her dissertation she explores the migration-development nexus, focusing on the role of migrants financial and non-financial remittances. Her main research interests are Economics of Migration, Development Economics, Economic Geography, and Applied Econometrics.
Dr Andreas Edel
Dr Andreas Forř Tollefsen
Andreas Forř Tollefsen (PhD Human Geography) is Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and previously Researcher for the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and postdoc at Bristol University. His current research focuses on conflict-induced migration, the impact of migrant arrivals on host communities, the environment-conflict nexus, and the role of local institutions in moderating conflict risks. He is currently leading the "Geographies of Conflict-Induced Migration" project, a Young Researcher Talent project funded by the Norwegian Research Council. He has developed and given courses at all levels in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and employs spatial data and spatio-temporal models in much of his research. His previous publications appear in Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Geography, World Development, Demography and Conflict Management and Peace Science.
Dr Miguel Gonzalez-Leonardo
Miguel González-Leonardo is Research Scholar at the Population and Just Societies Program (POPJUS) within the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA), where he is working on the European projects "Quantify Migration Scenarios for Better Policy" and "Future Migration Scenarios for Europe". Previously, he was a Predoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) with a FI competitive grant, Research Assistant and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Geography within the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). His research focuses on internal migration, human capital mobility and population decline.
Miguel holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the CED and UAB, and he participated in the European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) 2019-2020. During his doctoral studies, Miguel was involved in 1 European and 3 Spanish projects, and he carried out research stays at the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and at the Geographic Data Science Lab of the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool.
Susanne Höb
Susanne Höb is a Project Coordinator with a focus on Science Communication at Population Europe. Previously, she ran a video production company creating videos for publishers, organisations and institutions and worked as a video journalist. She graduated from Deutsche Journalistenschule and Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich with a Masters in Communication Sciences.
Dr Guillaume Marois
Guillaume Marois is an associate professor at the Asian Demographic Research Institute of the Shanghai University. He completed his PhD in demography at the National Institute for Scientific Research (Montreal) in 2014, and his master's degree in demography at the University of Montreal. He joined the IIASA World Population (POP) program at IIASA in 2016, to develop microsimulation models that allow for the projection of population under several socioeconomic dimensions. His main research interests include demographic projections, microsimulation, human capital, labor force participation, immigration and internal mobility.
Before joining IIASA, Dr. Marois was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of urbanism of the University of Montreal. From 2008 to 2012, he also worked as a research officer at the Quebec Statistical Institute.
Dr Jarl Mooyaart
Jarl Mooyaart read sociology at Utrecht University and completed a PhD on the link between family background and the transition to adulthood at the Netherland Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), graduating at the University of Groningen. His research interests are social inequality, life-course and migration. Within QuantMig he is a Postdoc researcher at NIDI working on Work Package 4: Countries of destination: economy and policy, in which he aims to unravel migration/mobility within the EU. He is also involved in WP7: Long-term European migration scenarios.
Dr Tone Sommerfelt
Tone Sommerfelt (PhD Social Anthropology) is Senior Researcher at PRIO, a member of the PRIO Migration Centre, and previously postdoc at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on the temporal horizons of migration, consequences of unfulfilled migration desires on persons' life course, and the migration-development nexus. Her previous research has focused on socio-political and religious dynamics in areas of out-migration, urban-rural livelihood adaptions, children's and youth's mobility and labour, and the global governance of child protection. She specializes in ethnographic fieldwork and the use of qualitative methodologies to shape survey research design. Her works have been published in The Journal of Modern African Studies, Conflict and Society, and Social Analysis.
Akira Soto-Nishimura
Akira Soto-Nishimura
Danube University Krems
Akira Soto Nishimura is a PhD student at Danube University Krems. He has a Master in Sociology and Social Research from Utrecht University and a Bachelor in Social and Behavioral Sciences from California State University Monterey Bay. His research interests include international migration, return migration, migration policy, racism, identity, segregation, and integration.
Dr Cathrine Talleraas
Cathrine Talleraas is Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI). She holds a PhD in Human Geography (2020), and is particularly interested in migration policy, management and transnationalism. Cathrine is currently leading the project "Effects of Externalisation: EU Migration Management in Africa and the Middle East" where she focuses migration policy in Africa and policy theory development.
Mahalia Thomas
Mahalia Thomas is a Project Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. She graduated from New York University with a Masters in Comparative Politics with a research focus in radical right extremism and comparative constitutional law. Additionally, she has worked in the field of User Experience for over five years, looking at how communication and dissemination strategies can be improved to make research and academia accessible for all.
Dr Jonas Vestby
Jonas Vestby is a Senior Researcher at PRIO. He wrote his Phd thesis on "Climate, development, and conflict: Learning from the past and mapping uncertainties of the future". Vestby's core expertise is in quantitative modeling of violent conflict, for causal inference, short-term prediction/early warning, and long-term forecasting/scenario building. Thematically, Vestby is particularly interested in the ties between climate, development, and various forms of violent conflict. Vestby has extensive experience working with country-level and subnational-level data relevant for conflict research and related topics, e.g. as evidenced through spearheading PRIO-GRID, a curated and open collection of sub-national data.
Prof Frans Willekens
Frans Willekens is Honorary Fellow of NIDI. He is Professor Emeritus, University of Groningen, former director of NIDI, former Chief Research Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and former Chair of the European Doctoral School of Demography (2005-2020). He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), a recipient of The EAPS Award for Population Studies (2014) of the European Association for Population Studies and The Mindel Sheps Award (2020) of the Population Association of America. In 2018, the Warsaw School of Economics awarded him a honorary doctorate. He has a PhD in systems engineering (1976). His main research interests are (a) international migration and (b) agent-based modelling and simulation.
Dr Federica Zardo
Dr. Federica Zardo is Senior Researcher at the Danube University Krems (Austria) in the Department for Migration and Globalisation and lecturer at the University of Vienna. She is a political scientist working at the intersection of International Relations and Public Policy, with an empirical focus on the EU migration policy and EU´s external relations. She is the PI of the MigFund project, funded by the Austrian Research Fund (FWF). Her research focuses on EU policy making processes in the realm of migration and on externalisation dynamics. Her work has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Geopolitics, International Politics, Mediterranean Politics and the European Foreign Affairs Review as well as in the form of a monograph by Palgrave Macmillan (2020). In addition to her research activities, she teaches courses on the EU migration policy, EU foreign policy and European integration at the University of Vienna.
Dr Marcello Carammia
Marcello Carammia is a Senior Researcher at the University of Catania. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of institutions and public policies, with special interest in the interaction between migration dynamics, politics, and policy.
Between 2015 and 2019 he was a Senior Researcher at the European Asylum Support Office (EASO - the EU Asylum Agency), where he was responsible for the Agency's research programme on the push and pull factors of asylum-related migration. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Malta. His articles appeared in such journals as European Union Politics, the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Policy Studies Journal, and South European Society and Politics.
Prof Jonathan Forster
Jon Forster is Professor and Head of Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick. He has held academic appointments at Loughborough and Carnegie Mellon Universities and the University of Southampton, where he was head of the School of Mathematical Sciences. He has published widely on statistical methodology and applications, particularly statistical demography. He is co-author of Kendall's Advanced Theory of Statistics (Vol 2b: Bayesian Inference) and was awarded the 1999 Guy Medal in Bronze by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). Since January 2020 he has been Vice-President (for Academic Affairs) of the RSS.
Dr Lauren Danielle Kok
Senior Expert specialized in research & analysis, project/programme planning, management and evaluation, and conceptual modeling. I have a strong background in quantitative and qualitative research methodology including data-collection, data-analysis and report writing.
Recently, I developed a new conceptual model on forecasting forced migration flows. This new model has given a new perspective on how to determine and measure the indicators of forced migration. Several governments have expressed interest in further developing the conceptual model and launching a pilot test.
Dr Giampaolo Lanzieri
Dr Giampaolo Lanzieri
Eurostat
Dr Constantinos Melachrinos
Constantinos is a Senior Analyst at the European Asylum Support Office and leads the Research Programme in the Data Analysis and Research Sector where he coordinates projects aimed at better understanding the root causes of asylum-related migration. In addition, he develops methods for early warning and forecasting mixed migration flows to support evidence based policy in the EU and provide operational support to the EU Member states.
Having graduated from MIT and the University of Chicago, Constantinos trained as a particle physicist at CERN, where he obtained his PhD for work with the ATLAS experiment, performed post-doctoral research in computational neuroscience and worked as data scientist in the insurance sector before joining EASO in 2019.
Dr Rainer Münz
Dr Rainer Münz
Central European University, School of Public Policy, Budapest and Vienna
Visiting Professor
Dr Marzia Rango
Dr Marzia Rango
IOM
Ann Singleton
Ann's work focuses on international migration data, the production of knowledge on migration and the development of migration and asylum policy. She has advised the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers and EU Presidencies, national governments, NGOs and international organizations. She is a Senior Advisor to the IOM's Global Migration Data Analysis Centre and a member of the UNDESA Statistics Division's Expert Advisory Group on International Migration Statistics.
Between 1996 and 2002 Ann developed the Eurostat database on international migration and asylum. From 2002 to 2004 she was responsible for policy on statistics in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Justice and Home Affairs. She wrote the European Commission's Action Plans on migration and asylum statistics, prepared the first EU online annual report on migration and asylum. She pioneered, with Eurostat, the first EU legislation on statistics on migration and international protection.
Dr Arkadiusz Wiśniowski
Arkadiusz is a Senior Lecturer in Social Statistics at the Social Statistics Department, University of Manchester. He co-leads the Statistical Modelling Research Group at the Cathie Marsh Institute. Previously, he worked as a Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Population Change and Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (University of Southampton), Researcher at the Central European Forum for Migration and Population Research (Polish Academy of Sciences and International Organisation for Migration), and Teaching and Research Assistant at the Department of Applied Econometrics (Warsaw School of Economics). His research interests include developing statistical methods for modelling and forecasting complex social processes, with a particular focus on migration and mobility, and combining traditional and new forms of data. He also has a general interest in time series analysis and forecasting, Bayesian computational methods, survey methods, and ageing.
Project partners
QuantMig is executed by a consortium of seven top European migration research institutions, led by the University of Southampton. The project partners include: Danube University Krems (DUK), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Max Planck Society – Population Europe (MPG-PE), Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and the University of Oslo (UiO). Besides, an external partner is Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) from Canada.
This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870299 QuantMig: Quantifying Migration Scenarios for Better Policy. This document reflects the authors'view and the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
