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Dr. Arun Balachandran is currently a Post-doctoral Research Scientist at the Columbia Aging Center, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University at New York. He was formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland where he worked with the India Human Development Survey– that develops, administer, and analyze different measures of social and gender empowerment. He received his PhD in demography from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2020. He did his pre-doctoral training at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, India, and has a background in the discipline of economics with a Master’s degree from the Madras School of Economics, India. He worked towards ‘Population Ageing in Europe and Asia: Beyond Traditional Perspectives’ during his PhD, where he developed new measures of population ageing for comparisons across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on gender. His works has been published in Ageing & Society, Journal of Ageing and Health, SSM-Population Health, Economic & Political Weekly and The Lancet.

His research interests are interdisciplinary and intersects across demography, gender, population ageing, and quantitative methodology. He is a former member of the Early Career Taskforce of the International Union for Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and has received the KB Pathak Memorial Award in 2019, given by the Indian Association for the Study of Population, for his methodological innovation in the field of Population and Health. Previously, he has also worked at the Population Council, New Delhi.