Wolfgang Lutz

Who is Wolfgang Lutz?

Wolfgang Lutz is an Austrian demographer specializing in demographic analysis and population projection. He founded the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in 2011 - a collaboration between IIASA, the Vienna Institute of Demography, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the WU-Vienna University of Economics and Business. In October 1985 he joined IIASA to lead the World Population Program. He is the director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2002 as well as a Full Professor of Applied Statistics at Vienna University since 2008. He also holds the position of Professorial Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin School for 21st Century Studies.

Lutz holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a second doctorate in Statistics from the University of Vienna.

Lutz has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, and population projection as well as the interaction between population and the environment. He has authored a series of world population projections produced at IIASA and developed approaches for projecting education and human capital. Lutz is also the principal investigator of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. Lutz is author and editor of 28 books and more than 200 refereed articles, including seven in Science and Nature. In 2008 he received an ERC Advanced Grant, in 2009 the Mattei Dogan Award of the IUSSP, and in 2010 the Wittgenstein Prize, often referred to as "Austria's Nobel Prize".