Celebrating IIASA’s 50th Anniversary at the Population Association of America Meeting 2023
IIASA’s demography community celebrated the Institute’s 50th Anniversary at the Population Association of America 2023 Annual Meeting in New Orleans on April 12-15. A special session dedicated to IIASA’s contributions to Multidimensional Demography and a reception co-organized with the US National Academy of Sciences (the US NMO) and the Friends of IIASA were the highlights of the extensive IIASA presence at the meeting, which also included workshops, an exhibit booth, YSSP outreach, and more than 12 presentations by IIASA researchers and recent YSSP participants.
The special session, Multi-Dimensional Demography for Sustainable Development: 50 Years of IIASA Contributions, featured presentations by IIASA current leaders, including IIASA Deputy Director General @Wolfgang Lutz and POPJUS Program Director @Anne Goujon, as well as by alumni of the Program. Andrei Rogers, the founder and first leader of the Population Program at IIASA, offered a remote presentation, describing how a sabbatical in 1975 turned into an 8-year sojourn in Laxenburg. Under Andrei’s leadership, the Human Settlements and Services Program became a major international research program on population, coordinating research collaborations across 17 IIASA NMO countries and becoming, as Wolfgang Lutz characterized it, “a cradle of methods” in multiregional/multistate mathematical demography. Stony Brook University Professor @Warren Sanderson, who recently received the 2023 IIASA Life Time Achievement Award, presented a summary of his groundbreaking work at IIASA on population aging. Other speakers explored additional topics to which IIASA’s multi-dimensional demography approaches have been applied, including migration, climate, conflict risks, and human well-being.
The session was standing room only, with nearly 100 people attending. The celebration continued at a nearby restaurant, where IIASA joined with the US National Academy of Sciences (the US NMO) and the Friends of IIASA to organize a reception to bring together the IIASA community (and the IIASA curious) who were attending PAA. Over 40 members of the IIASA community gathered to share IIASA stories and reconnect with the Institute and its work.
IIASA was on display throughout the conference. The Wittgenstein Centre hosted a Booth in the PAA Exhibit Hall, where YSSP alumni who had worked with the Population Program offered short YSSP information sessions for graduate students and advisors who were interested in learning more about the program. IIASA researchers presented their results at 12 additional PAA sessions, and IIASA researchers and colleagues organized a half-day workshop on Data and modeling approaches to assessing climate-conflict impact on population dynamics.
The presentation by Andrei Rogers may be found attached, and more photos from the event may be found here.