In 2023, the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science decided to finance the “SCOR Chair on Mortality Research” for the next four years (2023-2026).
The Chair is led by Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher, assistant professor at the Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics (CPop) at the University of Southern Denmark.
Objective of the Chair
How long do we live? With which health conditions do we age? Why and from what causes do we die? With life expectancy reaching unprecedented levels, answers to these questions are vital. The primary objective of this Chair is to initiate research in the fields of demography and actuarial science applied to the analysis of mortality and longevity.
Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher, Chair Director and Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary
Center on Population Dynamics (CPop) at the University of Southern Denmark
Steering Committee
- Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher, Chairholder, Associate Professor, CPop, SDU
- Zeying Peuillet, General Secretary, SCOR Foundation
- Julien Tomas, R&D Actuary, Knowledge, SCOR
- Razvan Ionescu, Head of Biometric Risk Modelling, Knowledge, SCOR
- Trifon Missov, Associate professor, CPop, SDU
- Jana Vobecká, Chief Academioc Officer, CPop, SDU
- Iñaki Permanyer, ICREA Research Professor, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
- Carlo-Giovanni Camarda, Senior Researcher, Institut National d’Études Démographiques
The research conducted under the Chair focuses on three main topics:
- Analyzing multi-morbidities and causes of death,
- Forecasting mortality,
- Developing demographic models to study changes in mortality.
The Chair aims not just to conduct groundbreaking demographic research in mortality and longevity, but also to train the next generation of researchers through the supervision of PhD students. An important aspect of the Chair is knowledge dissemination, through participation in international conferences and the organization of seminars in conjunction with the SCOR Foundation for Science.
View the News about the Chair here.
Latest News
Presentation made by Elizabet Ukolova in February 7, 2024 in Prague, presented at the Young Demographers conference.
In the prevailing era of cardiovascular and chronic diseases, the causes of death seldom operate in isolation. The researchers of the Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics (CPop) at the University of Southern Denmark aim to assess the impact of distortions in statistically significant associations between causes-of-death on the overall structure of cause-of-death dependencies. Focusing on the causes of death for USA in 2019, they study all possible scenarios for independence of diseases by optimizing the marginal distributions in the respective contingency tables.
They select the independence scenario that corresponds to the minimal intervention in the contingency table and study the effect of setting up independence between diseases i and j on the relationships between i or j and any other disease outside this pair. Their findings indicate significant, mostly decreasing, strength of the latter.
The most pronounced effects are observed in the loss of association for mental and behavioral disorders with other respiratory diseases, heart diseases with endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic disorders, as well as heart diseases with mental and behavioral disorders.
They show that assuming independence even for a single pair of otherwise dependent causes of death, can have an impact on the overall cause-of-death structure. Our results may serve as a reference point when optimizing strategies for multimorbidity prevention.
