Dr Jakub Bijak awarded prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant

Congratulations to CPC's Dr Jakub Bijak, Associate Professor in Demography, who has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for the project 'Bayesian Agent-based Population Studies: Transforming Simulation Models of Human Migration'.

The ERC announced the awarding of its Consolidator Grants to 314 top researchers in Europe on Tuesday. The funding, worth a total of 605 million euros, will give them a chance to have far-reaching impact on science and beyond. The grants fall under the 'Excellent Science' pillar of Horizon 2020, the EU's research and innovation programme.

Jakub, who also received the Allianz European Demographer Award in 2015 for "outstanding research on the causes and consequences of population developments in Europe", is delighted to receive this ERC grant and commented: "this funding is vital to continue my research on the methods for dealing with the phenomena of uncertainty in demography, in particular surrounding migration and the demography of armed conflict".

In the ERC press release on awarding Consolidator Grants 2016, the President of the ERC, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, commented: "Consolidator Grants support talented researchers still early in their careers.... The grantees who succeeded in this tough competition will enjoy full freedom and flexibility, important characteristics of ERC grants, to contribute to major advances in science."

Jakub's work at CPC in this area also includes a series of projects on demographic estimation and forecasting, carried out within the modelling strand of the Centre. The underlying theme of the ERC project - uncertainty in migration research - in discussed in more detail in this video.

Posted 16/12/2016 09:21