Jeroen Spijker is currently a “Ramón y Cajal” research fellow at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED). He obtained a BA in 1994 in Sociology and Human Geography from Massey University, New Zealand and a Master in 1997 and PhD in 2004 in Spatial Sciences (specialisation Demography) from Groningen University, the Netherlands.
The first time he came to the CED was in 2002 on a Marie Curie grant to complete his doctorate. Subsequently, from 2004 to 2012, he formed part of the CED research team. In 2012, the Catalan Government awarded him a two-months travel grant to do research at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. After that he worked for nearly two years at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and four months at the Vienna Institute of Demography. Since January 2015 he has returned to CED and now co-leads the research area “Health and Ageing”.
Jeroen is interested in a wide range of issues, including population ageing, socioeconomic determinants of mortality, the epidemiological transition, cohort changes in height and weight, the effect of education on the time of marriage, and family transitions after divorce and widowhood.