prof. dr. L.J.G. (Leo) van Wissen

Leo van Wissen professor of economic demography in the department of demography. His research interests include demographic modelling and forecasting, ageing, regional population change, spatial interaction. He supervised more than fifteen PhD’s on topics such as economic-demographic interactions, migration, regional demographic change, ageing, health and wellbeing, but also on firm demography. More recently he is active in the field of population ageing and its consequences. He teaches quantitative methods and techniques as well as projection models in the master program Population Studies. He was also vice-dean of the faculty in the period 2008-10.

He is also director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (KNAW-NIDI) in The Hague, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences KNAW. NIDI is the national demographic research centre for the Netherlands, and a prominent European demographic research institute. NIDI is affiliated with the University of Groningen.  

Leo van Wissen was educated as a human geographer at the Free University in Amsterdam (MSc and PhD). His PhD (1987) was entitled 'A dynamic model of household relocation' and was supervised by Professor Nijkamp. Leo was assistant professor at the Free University, where he worked on housing market and traffic and transportation research issues,. He was also guest researcher at the University of California at Irvine and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. In the period 1991-1999 Leo worked at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), the Hague, where he returned in 2010 as director. He is a member of the European Association for Population Studies EAPS, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population IUSSP, and member of the board of the European Doctoral School for Demography EDSD. He recently became a member of the Academia Europaea. He has been a member of review committees for both national and international scientific programs.