PhD on demographic behaviour of migrant communities in Belgium

The Faculty Social Sciences & Solvay Business School, Department Sociologie, Research Group Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

We are looking for a PhD student  who will participate in the iBOF project "How do international migration and internal mobility of migrants shape local populations? Developing a spatial microsimulation model of population dynamics with application in infectious disease modelling (DynaMIGs)”. DynaMIGs is a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by iBOF, starting in October 2025. International migration has gained considerable importance in the demography of European societies in recent decades. However, the long-term implications of migration for population dynamics—across various geographical levels—remain difficult to ascertain. This is largely due to the continued reliance on aggregate-level measures and models that fail to adequately capture migrants’ life courses in receiving countries. By leveraging population-wide longitudinal microdata on migrants (and their descendants) spanning several decades, DynaMIGs aims to analyse the association between life course transitions and spatial mobility in migrant populations at the individual and household levels.  In keeping with individual-based modelling in biostatistics, hazard models of life course transitions in migrant populations will be integrated into a dynamic microsimulation model. This model will in turn inform infectious disease transmission models that account for population heterogeneity by migrant background, thereby enabling more accurate projections of disease dynamics and disease burden in different segments of the population.

You will join the DynaMIGs-team, coordinated by prof. Karel Neels (Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp) and principal investigators Sylvie Gadeyne (VUB, BRISPO, Interface Demography )) and prof. Niel Hens ( University Hasselt, Data Science Institute)   Besides the project leaders, the Dynamigs team includes several senior and postdoc researchers.

As a part of this project, you will conduct quantitative research on demographic behaviour of migrant communities in Belgium, focussing on mobility patterns (internal migration), family transitions and mortality using administrative datasets. The findings will be published in scientific journals and culminate in a doctoral dissertation in Sociology. You will join Prof. Sylvie Gadeyne’s research team at Interface Demography at BRISPO-VUB and are expected to interact closely and constructively with all team members. 

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.