Sergei Scherbov - Biography#

Sergei Scherbov is the Director of Demographic Analysis at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, University of Vienna), and a Principal Research Scholar and a Project Leader at Population and Just Societies Program at IIASA.

Dr. Scherbov graduated from Moscow Aviation University where he studied operation research and applied mathematics, and received his Ph.D. in the theory of systems, control theory, and systems analysis from the Research Institute for Systems Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Dr. Scherbov joined IIASA Population Program in 1987. From 1991 - 2001 he was a Researcher and Senior Lecturer at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, teaching Demographic Methods and Computer Based Demographic Analysis. He returned to IIASA in 2002 to work on issues related to demographic modeling. In the period 1996 - 2001, he was a developer of methodology and computational models for probabilistic population projections (3 papers published in Nature on this topic).

In the last 20 years, his research focused on population aging. Redefining the age that considers changing characteristics of people led to a completely new look at the history and prospects of aging (3 papers in Science and Nature published on this topic). In 2012, he received an ERC Advanced Grant to develop new measures of aging. The manuscript “Prospective Longevity: A New Vision of Population Aging” published by Harvard University Press in 2019 became the highlight of the ERC project. In 2017 and 2019, the UN used those new measures in the World Population Ageing Report. In 2020, Scherbov received ERC Prove of Concept grant to work on the applicability of new aging measures to the design of pension systems.

Scherbov is an author, co-author, or co-editor of several books and more than 200 articles published in professional journals. Scherbov was an invited speaker at many events around the world and delivered numerous training courses.