Jakub Bijak

Professor Jakub Bijak is one of the most cited Polish scientists dealing with demographic research, in particular migrations and methods of demographic projection using Bayesian statistics.

Currently, he is the head of the Department of Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton. Earlier, he became distinguished as one of the leading scientists in the Central European Forum for Migration and Population Research (CEFMR) of the University of Warsaw. From 2001 to 2003, he worked for the International Tribunal in Hague, conducting research on the demographic consequences of the war in former Yugoslavia.

The demographics of armed conflicts remain an active research area for Professor Bijak. He is currently the editor of the Demographic Research, a leading academic journal in demographic sciences, and also sits on editorial boards of such journals as the Journal of Official Statistics and International Journal of Microsimulation.

Our prize winner has been involved in numerous projects related both to empirical research and to the development of statistical methods. He is the author and co-author of many publications in the best scientific journals specialising in research subjects. His works have contributed, in particular, to developing a Bayesian approach in population forecasts.

For his scientific activity, Prof. Bijak received numerous prizes and accolades, for example the Allianz European Demographer Award (2015) or the Jerzy Z. Holzer Medal (2007) awarded every five years by the Polish Academy of Sciences for an outstanding contribution to the development of demographics in Poland.