Emilio Zagheni

Session: Statistical Demography Seminar
Title: Measuring and understanding the dynamics of populations of scholars
Abstract: For a quarter of a century, the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) has fostered interdisciplinary research. This talk focuses on a project that started thanks to CSSS, and that builds on the spirit of the Center, in terms of blending statistics, demography (and social sciences more broadly), and modern data science practices. We measure migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time, using metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus. Specifically, we produce a database of annual international migration flows of scholars, for all countries, from 1998-2018 (the “Scholarly Migration Database”). We then use the newly generated database to provide evidence on the relationship between economic development and the emigration propensity of scholars, to assess patterns and trends of gender inequalities in international mobility, and the impact of policies on migration. This talk highlights initial key results as well as further ongoing developments to fully model and understand the dynamics of populations of scholars, including entry and exit from the academic system, in addition to mobility across space at different levels of spatial granularity.  

Emilio Zagheni is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Affiliate Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Demography (2010) and M.A. in Statistics (2008) from U.C. Berkeley. Zagheni is best known for his work on combining digital trace data and traditional sources to track and understand migrations and to advance population science. In 2016 he received the Trailblazer Award for Demographic Analysis from the European Association for Population Studies for his role in developing the field of Digital and Computational Demography. Emilio Zagheni's website.