Many years ago I made a (very rough) 'D is for Demography' children's alphabet book: github.com/MJAlexander/... Now the awesome @zehang-richard-li.bsky.social has made a fabulous 'B is for Bayesian' book: github.com/richardli/b_... Check it out! Gotta indoctrinate the kids early!!

🚨 Program Change 🚨 We’re excited to welcome Zhenchao Qian (Brown University) for our next POP Speaker Series talk on April 7th. Mark your calendars! He will be discussing Interethnic and Interracial Marriage in Asian Americans In person or by zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/89252071524

New article w/ Lindsay Katz & @rohanalexander.bsky.social in @ausjpolsci.bsky.social! Analyzing Australian House of Reps debates, we find that as women’s representation increases, interruptions of women MPs & interruptions overall decline Read more: doi.org/10.1080/1036... #polsky #gendersky

Paper led by colleagues from Australian National University is out now in JAMANetworkOpen. We used novel mortality measure to quantify how female reproductive cancers affect female survival advantages over male across ages and cohorts among high-income countries. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam....

We're recruiting a new cohort of postdocs focusing on health disparities research for our NIH-funded T32. pophealth.wisc.edu/health-dispa... Interested candidates should feel free to reach out!

Yesterday we heard from Orsola Torrisi on the consequences of violent crime on sexual and reproductive health outcomes as part of our POP speaker series! We thank Orsola for the excellent talk and attendees for the great discussion! Join us April 7 for our next talk with @mdhayward.bsky.social!

My favorite line in a piece full of good lines

At last, my first "I'm on the left and I say pronatalism sucks" piece longer than a tweet is out spectrejournal.com/non-natalism/

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop: In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table. Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission. She did not win a Nobel prize.

Weaponizing Kinship: Four out of ten Colombians have lost a family member in the conflict 🇨🇴 Enrique Acosta, Diego Alburez, Maria Gargiulo, & Catalina Torres quantified how many Colombians have ever lost at least a family member to conflict-related violence. www.demogr.mpg.de/go/weaponkinship

Really excited about this one! Find the Zoom link via the QR code below if you'd like to join us remotely.

Very excited to share that our speaker series featuring Orsola Torrisi next week will be a hybrid event! Scan the QR code to join! Come March 10th at 11 am EST for Orsola's talk on The Consequences of Violent Crime on Sexual and Reproductive Health Outcomes. Link : utoronto.zoom.us/j/86168036725

Two recent pre-prints: 1) "Same Prompt, Different Outcomes: Evaluating the Reproducibility of Data Analysis by LLMs" with Jiaxin (Allyson) Cui, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 2) "Benchmarking AI Performance on End-to-End Data Science Projects" with Evelyn Hughes, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14284 Comments welcome.

This was so great! Fabulous set of speakers

Next Tuesday 24 Feb the Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social is hosting flash talks featuring population researchers from around the UofT campus! Please come along if you're in Toronto or join online!

Looking forward to having @kazumi-t.bsky.social at the upcoming UofT Flash Session! Join us on on February 24 for our next event in the TPN speaker series! Find out interesting research insights from several excellent speakers from across the University of Toronto.

Nice to see this one out!

Continuing with our speakers for the upcoming UofT flash session we are happy to announce Melissa Milkie! Join us on on February 24 for our next event in the TPN speaker series! Find out interesting research insights from several excellent speakers from across the University of Toronto.

Fellow #demographers - coming to #PAA2026 ? 🤓 💫 Please save the date for the Feminist Demography Pre-Conference Workshop! Wednesday 5/6/2026 9-5pm CST in-person at PAA! Flash talks! A moderated panel discussion! And a social hour to connect with fellow feminist demography colleagues!

📢Job Offer‼️New Max Planck Research Group on Medical Demography Marcus Ebeling will lead the team starting on 1 July 2026. The research group will be based at the MPIDR in Rostock. Read an interview with Marcus on his future research here: www.demogr.mpg.de/go/rgmd (including link to job) #postdoc

Come and join us for our next event in the TPN speaker series! On February 24 we'll be hosting a multi-disciplinary UofT flash session with several excellent speakers from across the university. Here is a first look at one of our presenters Shari Eli!

Big congratulations to Rohan Alexander & Tim Hatton for their article ‘The making of a nation: Who voted for Australian federation?' which has won the 2025 Sir Timothy Coghlan award for best paper in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review!

This was a very cool talk, Chiara gave a great overview of bivariate health-death distributions. The recording is here for those interested: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Jl...

The Formal Demography Working Group is happening today at 10am ET!

The Formal Demography Working Group is meeting next Thursday 5 Feb at 10am ET (4pm CET)! Chiara Micheletti will present work on CVD incidence and survival inequalities in Finland. Sign up for Zoom Link! formaldemography.github.io/working_group/

Yesterday was the official kick off of the Toronto Population Network speaker series. We want to thank @lucampesando.bsky.social for the excellent presentation on the Dynamics of School Expansion and Inter-Caste Marriage in India. Come join us Feb 24th for the second event in the series!

The first @tpn-uoft.bsky.social pop seminar is tomorrow! If you're in Toronto come along and see @lucampesando.bsky.social ! 11am in Sociology dept (level 17, 700 University Ave).

The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!

This semester I'm teaching demographic methods to sociology grad students and having a whale of a time. Here are the materials if people are interested (will be updated throughout the semester): github.com/MJAlexander/...

Call for papers: joint conference of the Canadian Population Society and the Association des démographes du Québec; to be held in Ottawa on May 25-28: event.fourwaves.com/cps-adq-2026...

Ana Elisa Lopez, @rohanalexander.bsky.social and my paper, "Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education" is now available (the "Just Accepted" version) from Harvard Data Science Review: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/xv4hxs7u...

This one might be of interest to demographers! On Wednesday Amy Mann will talk about her work (w/ me and @mathewkiang.com) on metrics for measuring the quality of cause of death data. We find huge variation in quality across the US.

What's the best Beethoven and why is it the 7th Symphony

A short reflection on my childhood piano teacher, who taught me to read music, and as a consequence, indirectly taught me to love data analysis: www.monicaalexander.com/posts/2025-1...

ISBA Community: The deadline to propose a contributed talk for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting is next Friday, November 21. Proposals may be submitted using this form: forms.gle/dVTUrdEuVF6g... See the call below for details 👇

Over a dozen ways to decompose life expectancy, all in one (we hope) friendly interface. Please have a look at the LEdecomp R package cran.r-project.org/web/packages... See the function LEdecomp() for access to all of them. If we left something out, please shout! #rstats #demography #mortality

There are three Toronto Data Workshop online talks coming up 12, 19, and 26 November, noon EST. This first is this Wednesday at noon on Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970. All welcome.

Amazing and heartwarming to see a packed crowd of people last week eager to grow the demography community at UofT and Canada more broadly 🫶 Huge thanks to all our guest speakers, the support of @uoftsociology.bsky.social and to my fellow co-leads @leafiaye.bsky.social and @joannapepin.bsky.social

One of the recommendations: @rohanalexander.bsky.social ‘s book

hope to see your work, especially in the realm of caregiving and/or LGBTQ+ kinship!

Look what we're up to @uoftsociology.bsky.social!

We are building a new pop center at UofT and will hold our first mini-conference on Nov 6 - come join us!! Exhibit 1: amazing speaker line-up - featuring friends around the world to discuss why demography/pop center matters! 🤓 Exhibit 2: the iconic castle where this conference will take place 🏰 ✨

The Toronto Population Network is holding a conference on 6 November at Hart House at UofT. Keynote from @ridhikashyap.bsky.social! If you're in Toronto come along and help us build the community of demographers and population researchers here! Registration: www.eventbrite.com/e/toronto-po...

Very excited to announce that @srhayford.bsky.social, @lesja.bsky.social, and I will be guest-editing a special volume of @prpr-journal.bsky.social on "Contemporary Pronatalism in Demographic Context"! Submissions due March 1, 2026. link.springer.com/collections/...

🚨New Tenure Position! We're looking for a new colleague to join our dynamic team in Belgium. Innovative quantitative methods | Health & environment | Population dynamics Read job description here: jobs.uclouvain.be/PersonnelAca... Application Deadline: Nov 11, 2025 #job #tenure

We are hiring! We are inviting applications for the Chapman Fellowship in Statistics at Imperial College London. This is a kind of super-postdoc: 3 years contract, excellent working conditions, and candidates are expected to propose an independent research plan. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

UofT grad students - help advance social policy's media presence! Pitch us an opinion piece on social policy. If approved, you'll earn $500 for the completed piece. More info: cgsp-cpsm.ca/2025/09/22/c...

I'm super excited to announce that ISBA @isba-bayesian.bsky.social has voted to start a new section on Bayesian Social Sciences! It will be a great way to further collaborations with many disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities. bss-isba.github.io

The new Bayesian Social Sciences section of @isba-bayesian.bsky.social has just been created: bss-isba.github.io. The committee is myself as chair, @robinryder.bsky.social, chair elect from 2027, @nialfriel.bsky.social, program chair, @monjalexander.bsky.social, Treasurer, EJWagenmakers, Secretary.

The data is now available for all teams who've already signed up! More sign-ups very welcome! Happy analysing! 💻📊