Wen Su
Demographer and applied statistician at Oxford 🇬🇧, formerly ANU 🇦🇺. Understanding human mortality through mathematical methods 🧮. Stand-up & funny socks. Views are my own.
- Reposted by Wen SuDr. Josh Wilde: "But lower birthrates don’t necessarily mean the population or economy will shrink, especially in the near-term...The engine of adaptation that enabled us to survive the population bomb could help us weather a future with fewer babies." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/h... #demography
- Reposted by Wen SuThis 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...
- Reposted by Wen SuThe 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/
- Reposted by Wen SuWe are excited to share our upcoming line-up of Brown Bag talks for the 2026 Spring semester! Our Brown Bag talks are held every Wednesday at noon (PT) at the UC Berkeley Demography Department's Seminar Room (310 Social Sciences Building), and via Zoom. Join us starting next week!
- Reposted by Wen SuN-IUSSP: The importance of educational expansion for longevity trends www.niussp.org/health-and-m... #demography #populationstudies
- Beautifully written by @drjenndowd.bsky.social on replacement level fertility. Some very inspiring ideas: do not treat replacement fertility as a threshold for destiny.
- After @philipncohen.com's talk, I had #demography on the brain today! jenndowd.substack.com/p/what-is-re... @oxforddemsci.bsky.social @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuIn “...Educational Expansion to Trends in Life Expectancy & Lifespan Variation,” @jdzazueta.bsky.social @ugobas.bsky.social @ezagheni.bsky.social et al. show how expansion contributes to ↑ expectancy and ↓ variation. @oxforddemsci.bsky.social @mpidr.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...
- Reposted by Wen SuNew @pnas.org paper constructing subnational estimates of internet and mobile adoption by gender, including gender gaps, for 117 low- and middle- income countries from 2015 through 2025. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- @farid-flici.bsky.social has done some amazing works! Please check it out his seminar.
- Join us next week to hear from @farid-flici.bsky.social on population ageing and social security sustainability in Algeria 🇩🇿 🗓 Wednesday, 22 October 2025 🕐 12:45–13:45 (BST) 📍 KS-LG19 💻 Zoom: lshtm.zoom.us/j/89990670777 ℹ️ More details: www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/cen...
- Reposted by Wen SuHMDHFDplus updated to account for minor web design update of @hmdatabase.bsky.social . If you started experiencing funny behavior when using the package to read HMD data from the web, just reinstall; it's already on CRAN. #rstats #demography #mortality
- Reposted by Wen SuFor our next seminar at the Demography Department at Cedeplar, UFMG, we have the extraordinary Ridhi Kashyap @ridhikashyap.bsky.social presenting. Don´t miss it! The Zoom link is below. We see you all tomorrow, October 8, at 2 pm Brazilian time 👇 💡 Zoom link: lnkd.in/e5UC-M54 #demography
- Reposted by Wen Su✍️ Just out: Annette Baudisch & I delve into the formal demography of fertility, birth, & reproduction timing. 👶 We use methods from mortality research to summarize when in the parental life course children are born. 📆 1/n doi.org/10.1080/0032... @sdu.dk @oxforddemsci.bsky.social @mpidr.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuHot off the press 🔥 My first PhD chapter is now published as a research article in Population, Space and Place! @mpidr.bsky.social @phrg-standrews.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
- Reposted by Wen Su🚨It's that exciting time of year!🚨 Our team has got TWO open DPhil (PhD) positions in #datascience + #health here at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social for 2026🎉! See for details: 1️⃣ 👉 crahal.com/HDS_2026.html 2️⃣ 👉 crahal.com/pophealth_2026.html Please share and help us to find our future teammates ❤️!
- Reposted by Wen SuI am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
- Reposted by Wen Su👋 We are happy to welcome Tabitha Scott and Damiano Uccheddu as research fellows at Assoc. Prof. Valeria Bordone's team @ageingsocvienna.bsky.social ! Read more about them ➡️ www.soz.univie.ac.at/en/detail-ne... @valeriabordone.bsky.social @damianouccheddu.bsky.social #sociology @univie.ac.at
- Reposted by Wen SuPersistent minimizing of the COVID death toll hits me especially hard in the #demography feels. To be clear: ➡️ Over one million Americans died of COVID-19. ➡️ Official COVID deaths were likely undercounted, not overcounted. jenndowd.substack.com/p/how-many-p...
- Reposted by Wen SuFollowing major European pandemics and wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, "recovery times across events averaged approximately seven years and showed no significant statistical differences by event type or sex," find Silva & Aburto in new article: doi.org/10.1007/s426...
- Reposted by Wen SuHealth demographers 📣 Calling for submissions to our w. @timriffe1.bsky.social Healthy Life Expectancy methodology collection on @genus.bsky.social! We're seeking innovative approaches to statistical modelling and empirical analysis of health inequalities 📈 📆 Submission deadline: 01/06/26 🔗 Link 👇
- Reposted by Wen Su⚠️ICYMI: Oxford Demography (LCDS) is offering three short courses throughout this academic year. A great chance to visit Oxford & learn from our amazing team! 🤓🏛️ Details [course titles, dates, fees] available here: www.demography.ox.ac.uk/short-courses @oxforddemsci.bsky.social
- My dear friend and colleague Markus Sauerberg has written a nice blog post on a new and exciting way of quantifying mortality difference using the earth-movers distance (Wasserstein distance). You can find them here: msauerberg.github.io/blog/2025/wa..., and msauerberg.github.io/blog/2025/wa....
- Reposted by Wen Su🗣️Exciting PhD opportunity! Join @lshtm.bsky.social PSG and @mpidr.bsky.social as a PhD student/Research Assistant on an 3-year project leading to a funded PhD. The role focuses on developing cutting-edge methods to model health & mortality in low-income countries. jobs.lshtm.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...
- Reposted by Wen SuI am looking for a postdoc to join my ERC StG project DIVREP to work on global, quantitative analyses of fertility and reproductive behaviour. The post is based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. Let me know if you have any questions. More details below👇
- 🚨 New Job Alert! 🚨 Join Dr @ewabatyra.bsky.social as a Postdoc Researcher in Demography! Contribute to a global study on disparities in reproductive behaviour, focusing on childbearing age & fertility levels 👨👩👦👦 Apply now 👉 www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/event/postdo...
- This is going to be an awesome workshop organised by @hggaddy.bsky.social ! Please sign up for it if you are interested. 🎉
- 📢 Interested in excess mortality methods, and want a challenge? I'm organising the "One Epidemic, Many Estimates" (1EME) project! Register *now* as a many analyst team (submissions due 15 March 2026), and then join us at LSE for a workshop on 21-22 May 2026! (1/n) www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...
- Reposted by Wen Su🚨 New Job Alert! 🚨 Join Dr @ewabatyra.bsky.social as a Postdoc Researcher in Demography! Contribute to a global study on disparities in reproductive behaviour, focusing on childbearing age & fertility levels 👨👩👦👦 Apply now 👉 www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/event/postdo...
- Reposted by Wen SuSome of my brilliant colleagues here at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social are now organizing an online metrics and models seminar that has really high quality speakers. It is online and open to everyone so have a look at the program and write yourself in metrics-and-models.github.io
- Reposted by Wen SuJust finished reading (the non-technical parts of 😋) this paper by @ang-yu.bsky.social and Felix Elwert. This is conceptually really cool stuff that may also be of interest to psychologists working on group differences, so here's a short 🧵 with my understanding of it:> arxiv.org/abs/2306.16591
- Reposted by Wen SuMy latest article in @genus.bsky.social, coauthored with @sergitl.bsky.social & Inaki Permanyer, shows that migrants from less developed world regions are more likely to have a mortality advantage compared to natives. Read more here: genus.springeropen.com/articles/10....
- Our new paper is published in Pop Studies, together with Mike Hollingshaus and Vladimir Canudas-Romo. We presented a decomposition method looking at the numerator and denominator of age-specific death rates in assessing the time changes in life expectancy. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....
- We applied this method in the paper to produce results with cross-national comparison with populations in HMD during 2009-2019 and subnational comparison for the US during 2009-2019.
- We showcase some interesting insights into the future of longevity for some countries as well as public challenges faced by others. We believe this method could also open some new methodological avenues for future research.
- And the colour palette of green and gold to commemorate the wonderful years I spent in Canberra with some amazing people!
- @polizzan.bsky.social I see you are already dressed for the Aussie winter 🤣. Safe travels!
- 🚅🛫🛄 Australia, brace yourself! MPIDR Alpaka Max & colleagues are setting off on their journey Down Under. We look forward to meeting you at #IPC2025! Safe Travels! @conteristo.bsky.social @philippdierker.bsky.social @aledinal.bsky.social @isamarinetti.bsky.social @thiagomalaguth.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuAre you attending the International Population Conference in Brisbane? The IUSSP Panel on Digital and Computational Demography is organising *3* pre-conference workshops on digital gender inequalities, kinship and microsimulation, and migration and digital trace data iussp.org/en/digital-a...
- Reposted by Wen Su🚀 RobustiPy is out of beta! Feature rich, we hope it becomes useful for model uncertainty / #datascience. We include 🔟 replications, including “unexplained discrepancies” in prior work! 📄 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19958 💻 GitHub: github.com/RobustiPy/robustipy 🌐 Homepage: robustipy.github.io
- Reposted by Wen SuIn 2017 we published an illustrative Lexis surface of mortality sex ratios in England and Wales. How should I update the plot? It seems like we need a new direct annotation for the recent increase in sex ratio. What should the label say?
- Reposted by Wen SuFeeling bittersweet as I read this wonderful thread and reflect on my time at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social, @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social, + @sociologyoxford.bsky.social coming to a close. Immensely grateful to my supervisors, assessors, colleagues, + friends for making this journey so meaningful. 👨🎓📜
- 1/ A huge congrats to Dr. Antonino Polizzi @polizzan.bsky.social, who passed his DPhil viva for his thesis “The Causes and the Consequences of Growing Life Expectancy Shortfalls” on Friday, examined by Prof. @ridhikashyap.bsky.social & Dr. Iñaki Permanyer. @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social #demography
- Reposted by Wen SuHey demographers! We're starting up the formal demography working group again! Next Friday 16 May at 11:30am ET @hggaddy.bsky.social will talk to us about challenges in estimating crisis mortality. Excited! Head to the website to sign up for Zoom details: formaldemography.github.io/working_group/
- Reposted by Wen SuAng Yu has successfully defended his dissertation! 🎓 He and Felix Elwert published "Nonparametric causal decomposition of group disparities" in The Annals of Applied Statistics. doi.org/10.1214/24-A...
- Reposted by Wen SuThe biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences? This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.
- Reposted by Wen Su📢 Another exciting opportunity to join Mortality and Inequalities Research Group and work with José Manuel Aburto! We're hiring a 3-year Research Fellow in Population Data Science. Apply by May 16! 🔗 Full details and application: jobs.lshtm.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...
- Reposted by Wen SuA couple of days ago I gave a guest lecture on an Introduction to Bayesian Demography. The materials are here if people are interested! Includes a few examples using R and Stan: mjalexander.github.io/bayesian-dem...
- Reposted by Wen Su📝 A new study involving Dr José Manuel Aburto and Daniel Zazueta explores the impact of violence and COVID-19 on Mexico's life expectancy losses and recent bounce-backs between 2015 and 2022 buff.ly/G2SFOvt @leverhulme.ac.uk @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social @sociologyoxford.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuAre we really #aging in bursts? A study made headlines claiming that rather than aging gradually, humans age in accelerated “bursts”- specifically at age 44 & 60. I know, it *feels* true. But if you are reaching one of these aging milestones, don’t panic. jenndowd.substack.com/p/are-we-rea...
- Reposted by Wen Su*JOB OPENING* Come join me and the Digital Gender Gaps team @sociologyoxford.bsky.social @oxforddemsci.bsky.social. We study digital gender inequalities and their consequences w/ social media, geospatial, and population data. tinyurl.com/postdoc-oxf Apply by 9 May, noon (UK)
- Reposted by Wen Su6 PhD scholarships at University of Padova for candidates interested in the area of Statistical Sciences- included Demography Start of activities: November 1st, 2025 Annual grant: 18,643.00 euros (gross) The call is published (deadline May 13, 2025 - 1 pm CEST) at www.unipd.it/en/node/1053
- Reposted by Wen SuA vaccine to prevent dementia? Perhaps not science fiction! A fascinating new study by @meyting.bsky.social @nature.com used a natural experiment w/ shingles vaccine rollout in Wales & found a 20% drop in dementia. I break down the deets: jenndowd.substack.com/p/can-the-sh...? #episky #econsky
- Reposted by Wen SuAre you on your way to #PAA2025? 😎 Check out our programme and come say hi at booth 112 buff.ly/Ng5zLRU @popassocamerica.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk @oxpop.bsky.social @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social @mpidr.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuAttending #IPC2025 in Brisbane and interested in #mortality #forecasting? Register for our hands-on workshop on “Advances in Mortality Forecasting” (11-12 July) ipc2025.iussp.org/side-meeting... @mpidr.bsky.social @ined.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen Su1/ If it feels like a tsunami of bad news right now, I’m here to cheer you up with one trend that is moving in a positive direction: ➡️ Age-specific rates of #dementia have decreased substantially since 1984. #SomeGoodNews jenndowd.substack.com/p/some-good-...
- Reposted by Wen SuCome to Oxford! 🪄 Hiring now: Senior Researcher in Geospatial Health and Digital Pandemic Preparedness More info: tinyurl.com/maf6db7h @oxforddemsci.bsky.social #demography www.demography.ox.ac.uk Linked with: mapineq.eu/inequality-d... And : tinyurl.com/ks4u84z **REPOST WIDELY PLEASE* DM if❓
- I endorse this message!
- 💥José Manuel Aburto is seeking an early career colleague to join his forming team as a postdoc 🌿 JM is an exceptional mentor and friend. And now he is inviting a lucky colleague to join for an exciting ride. It's a highway to the frontier of demography. Catch this unique chance 🚀 lnkd.in/dBJyaF9p
- 🚨 We’re hiring! 🚨 3-year Research Fellow position available in the newly established Mortality and Inequalities Research Group, working closely with José Manuel Aburto. Deadline 15 April. DM us if interested. See details 👉 jobs.lshtm.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... More positions coming soon, stay tuned!
- Reposted by Wen Su👏 Kudos to @andreatilstra.bsky.social @polizzan.bsky.social @sanderwagner.bsky.social and Eva Akimova whose @naturecomms.bsky.social paper is among the top 25 most downloaded in social science and human behaviour for 2024 buff.ly/NmynGFV
- Reposted by Wen Su🎓 Congrats to Dr Ursula Gazeley who won the Cicely Williams Prize during her graduation ceremony at @lshtm.bsky.social 🥳 buff.ly/U1ndPD3 The prize is awarded to an exceptional doctoral student whose research advances the health of vulnerable populations. @leverhulme.bsky.social @oxpop.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuThe Population and Development turns 50 this year! To mark the occasion, w/ @aasli.bsky.social, we conduct a computational analysis of research themes and author characteristics in PDR and compare with @readdemography.bsky.social and Population Studies. doi.org/10.1111/padr...
- This is a very exciting perspective Jonas. Very keen to read the paper when it's published!
- Reposted by Wen SuHow can we #AccelerateAction to improve women's health outcomes? buff.ly/pacAIJZ A new study co-authored by Dr Ursula Gazeley identifies the leading causes of maternal deaths globally and highlights the need to reduce health inequities in LMICs. @leverhulme.bsky.social @oxpop.bsky.social #IWD2025
- Reposted by Wen SuOn #InternationalWomensDay, @ridhikashyap.bsky.social's Digital Gender Gaps team have launched an updated dashboard to #AccelerateAction by helping to ensure women are equal participants in digital society buff.ly/OSV35V8 @leverhulme.bsky.social @oxpop.bsky.social @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen SuHow do drinking and smoking habits change during marital separation? 🚬🍻 You can read Nicole and I's new article in JHSB here (Open access!): doi.org/10.1177/0022... @nicolekapelle.bsky.social @jofhsb.bsky.social
- A new study by @andreatilstra.bsky.social and @nicolekapelle.bsky.social examined the smoking and drinking habits of over 13,000 Australians to understand how people cope with the stress associated with marital separation buff.ly/NGgh38g @oxpop.bsky.social @leverhulme.bsky.social
- Reposted by Wen Su📢 #episky #lifeexpectancy The United States Mortality DataBase #USMDB state series have been updated to include 2021 and 2022 life table estimates ➡️ usa.mortality.org Scatter plot of declines in e(0) between 2022 and 2019 for each state, both sexes combined, plotted against e(0) in 2019
- Reposted by Wen Su📢🎉🤖 Published today in natcomputsci.bsky.social /w @jiani-y.bsky.social📢🎉🤖: A new framework for (ir)reducible errors. We argue that it's impossible to know how 'predictable' things are (until we've collected every epsilon of information). ReadCube: rdcu.be/eb9IL arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19223
