Arun Balachandran is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland. 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 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 was working with the Population Council, New Delhi. In addition to his work on population ageing, he is currently working on the WEDGE project– that evaluates measures of gender empowerment with a global focus, and the India Human Development Survey– that develops, administer and analyze different measures of social and gender empowerment.