Hans-Peter Kohler

Hans-Peter Kohler uses demography and economics, along with innovative data, to study social behaviors and outcomes that transform societies around the world: health, aging, fertility and family change. He is committed to making a difference through policy-relevant research, the creation of novel data resources, the effective dissemination of findings, the training of the next generation, and the building of impactful institutions and global collaborations.

Central to his research is the integration of demographic, economic, sociological, and biological approaches to better understand outcomes and behaviors across diverse populations. For example, he has investigated the causes of accelerated aging in low-income populations, the determinants of cognitive decline and ADRD, the lifecourse consequences of early-life adversities, the long-term effect of health interventions, the role of mortality expectations for health-related behaviors, the significance of social and sexual networks for HIV behaviors and infection risks, the determinants and consequences of low and lowest-low fertility, the relevance of social interactions for demographic change, and the rapidly transforming structures of global families.

His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others foundations. He has been awarded the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement by the Population Association of America for my interdisciplinary work on fertility and health, and have been honored with Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography by the American Sociological Association.

He co-directs Penn’s Population Aging Research Center (PARC) and shaped PARC’s distinctive identity as a globally leading center for innovative interdisciplinary research on the demography and economics of aging. He served as the Chair of Penn’s Graduate Group in Demography for many years, and co-direct the NIA-funded Get Experience in Aging Research (Gear UP) undergraduate training program. He also directs the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) and have spearheaded its evolution from a narrowly-focused reproductive health study into a major social science research project providing a rare record of 25+ years of longitudinal population data in one of the poorest countries in the world.