Member Profile

Magali Barbieri has a joint research position in UC-Berkeley’s Department of Demography and at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris, France. At Berkeley, she has been working in various capacities for the Human Mortality Database (HMD) project and she became its Associate Director in 2013. First published in 2002, the HMD is an open-access database with uniformly constructed series of mortality rates and life tables for 39 countries. The HMD is a worldwide reference for mortality research, with nearly 50,000 registered users and more than 3,000 scientific peer-reviewed publications citing the database as their main source as of the end of 2017. Over the past several years, she has also been leading an effort to create the United States Mortality DataBase (USMDB) an HMD-like database for all 50 U.S. states and D.C. for years 1959-2015, in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics and support from the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. In addition to her leadership role, Dr. Barbieri has maintained an active research career, presenting papers at scientific conferences on a regular basis and publishing a series of notable articles in top demography and other internationally ranked journals. Though most of her initial work focused on the population dynamics of developing countries, her interests have progressively shifted to high-income countries and, more specifically, to issues of mortality inequalities and comparative trends in causes of death (both across and within countries). She received her PhD in Demography from UC-Berkeley.