24 August 2017
Under the title "Moving Frontiers in Population Forecasting and Aging", Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Stefanie Andruchowitz have put together a collection of major scientific contributions of Sergei Scherbov throughout his career. Although he has recently spent a lot of his time redefining age and aging, nevertheless, reaching the chronological age of 65 is still widely viewed as a threshold worth celebrating. But only under the conventional old-age dependency ratio – which itself should be retired soon – he is now moving from the denominator to the numerator. But, with 65 being the new 55, he should still have many productive years ahead, and this volume is just an interim assessment of his work.
The book consists of six sections that reflect Scherbov's expert fields of demographic modelling, population projections, data processing and presentation, and measuring aging. Each part has an introduction written by one of his past or current collaborators, which is followed by annotated reprints of key publications spanning 34 years, from 1983 to 2017.
First and foremost, his work has dealt with population forecasting, that is split it into probabilistic population forecasts (with an introduction by Wolfgang Lutz) and long-term scenario analysis (with an introduction by Brian O’Neill). Next there is a section on Sergei’s current preoccupation with redefining age and aging (with an introduction by Warren Sanderson and Stefanie Andruchowitz). Another section bundles contributions on directly policy-relevant topics and models relating population and the environment which were spread over quite some years (with an introduction by Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz). While all of his work was based on solid demographic methods, some papers had an explicitly methodological focus and form a separate cluster (with an introduction by Frans Willekens). Finally, in the very recent past, Sergei has again strengthened his links to Russia, in a way coming back to important work he did over 30 years ago before joining IIASA. This work is put together in the section "Back to Russian Roots” (with an introduction by Serhii Pyrozhkov).
Scherbov is currently World Population Deputy Program Director. Together with Warren C. Sanderson, he has developed new methods of the analysis of aging that take characteristics of people into account. Their research has been published in major scientific journals, including Nature and Science. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded Reassessing Ageing from a Population Perspective (Re-Ageing) project at IIASA that, among other things, ascertains the extent to which advanced societies are actually aging in multiple dimensions, including health, cognitive abilities, and longevity.
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Interim Deputy Director General for Science Directorate - DDG for Science Department
Principal Research Scholar and Senior Program Advisor Population and Just Societies Program
Principal Research Scholar and Senior Program Advisor Social Cohesion, Health, and Wellbeing Research Group - Population and Just Societies Program
IIASA Re-Aging Project
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