The dominant demographic trend of the 21st century is population aging. Virtually all countries of the world are getting older, creating pressure to transform the ways in which societal and economic structures as well as individual life courses are arranged. Understanding these challenges requires deep demographic knowledge combined with interdisciplinary expertise in epidemiology and population health, and proficiency with econometric, statistical, data science and computational methods.
The International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS) is a new and unique three-year doctoral program that merges demography, epidemiology and data science. The PHDS school equips doctoral students not only with advanced knowledge of the theory and methods of demography and epidemiology (broadly defined as ‘population health’), but also with strong technical skills in statistics, mathematical modeling, and computational and data management methods (broadly referred to as ‘data science’).
IMPRS-PHDS is hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR; www.demogr.mpg.de) in Rostock, Germany. Founded in 2019, the school receives core support from the Max Planck Society, MPIDR, University of Rostock, and ten affiliated institutions. It does not charge fees, and makes available about 15 three-year PhD positions every year. The school’s curriculum is targeted to pre-doctoral students entering the School with a Master’s or equivalent degree and offers
- strong interdisciplinary research training in population, health and data science;
- high quality supervision across at least two institutes;
- extensive networking opportunities across 12 partner sites in Europe and the U.S.;
- a core training program at the MPIDR.
