prof. dr. ir. F.J.C. (Frans) Willekens

Among Frans Willekens’s areas of research interest are multistate demography, population forecasting, statistical demography, the analysis of life history data and in particular the reconstruction of life histories from incomplete data. He published in journals such as Population Studies, Mathematical Population Studies, World Development, European Journal of Population, Environment and Planning A, Regional Science and Urban Economics, World Health Statistics Quarterly. Five of his papers are reproduced in Readings in population research methodology, by D.J. Bogue, E.E. Arriaga and D.L. Anderton eds., Social Development Center, Chicago, and UNFPA, New York, 1993. He has in the past developed and distributed demographic software for multistate demographic analysis, such as SPA (Spatial Population Analysis) (with Andrei Rogers), LIFEINDEC (increment-decrement life table), and MUDEA (multiregional demographic analysis).

Frans Willekens began working part-time at the University of Groningen in 1989 and joined the Faculty of Spatial Sciences full-time in 1993. He received his Ph.D. in Urban Systems Engineering and Policy Planning from Northwestern University, USA in 1976. He has worked as a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis  (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. During this time, he conducted the IIASA Migration and Settlement Study with Andrei Rogers. From 1980 to 1993, he was deputy director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute  (NIDI) in The Hague. In 1991, he founded the Population Research Centre.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW ) appointed Frans Willekens director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW) as of August 1, 2003.

Frans Willekens is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.