Prof. Roland Rau Professor of Demography University of Rostock & Max-Planck-Institute for Demography, Rostock, Germany

Roland Rau is Professor of Demography at the University of Rostock, Germany, and leads the research group Mathematical and Actuarial Demography as a Max-Planck-Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, situated also in Rostock. He holds a Diploma in Political Science (Germany's former equivalent of a Master's degree) and a PhD in Demography. His research is situated at the intersection of demography, epidemiology and statistics. Apart from his methodological work and visualizations of mortality dynamics, Rau studies mortality in aging societies, predominantly in Europe. Some of his research interests in that area are regional disparities, socioeconomic differences, winter excess mortality and the mortality of the oldest old.

He received the Otto-Hahn-Medal from the Max Planck Society for his doctoral dissertation and won a highly competitive ERC Starting Grant.

Rau's research has been published in leading demographic, medical, and general science journals. He is one of the authors of "The emergence of longevous populations", which was published in PNAS and won the Cozzarelli Award from the US National Academy of Sciences for the best paper in the behavioral and social sciences. He also co-authored a paper on "Ageing populations: the challenges ahead" in The Lancet which has been cited more than 3000 times so far.