Rate My Professor Vladimir Canudas Romo

Professor Vladimir Canudas-Romo is the Professor and Head of the School of Demography at the Australian National University, a position he has held since 2017. He earned a Bachelor in Actuarial Sciences and Mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1993 to 1997 and a Master in Population Studies from FLACSO Mexico from 1997 to 1999. He received his PhD through a joint collaboration between the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany from 1999 to 2003. Following his doctoral studies, Canudas-Romo was awarded the Dewitt Wallace Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Population Council to conduct research at Pennsylvania State University from 2003 to 2005. He subsequently served as Research Scientist at the Department of Demography, University of California, Berkeley, from 2005 to 2007, and as Assistant Professor jointly at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark from 2007 to 2013. Prior to joining ANU, he was Associate Professor at the Max Planck Odense Centre in Denmark starting in 2013.

Canudas-Romo's research specializes in formal demography, encompassing mathematical relations between demographic measures and the creation of novel methods to elucidate human population phenomena. His work examines disparities in mortality and health across causes of death, including temporal trends in life expectancy and other longevity indicators, disproportionately high homicide mortality in select populations, elevated mortality among individuals with mental disorders compared to the general population, and variations by education, social status, and other subgroups. He has produced 109 research outputs, comprising 96 articles, 6 book chapters, 3 comments or debates, and 2 encyclopedia entries. Prominent publications include "Female Reproductive Cancers and the Sex Gap in Survival" (JAMA Network Open, 2026), "Socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy in Australia, 2013–22: an ecological study of trends and contributions of causes of death" (The Lancet Public Health, 2025), "Changes in numerators and denominators of death rates and their contributions to changes in life expectancy" (Population Studies, 2025), "A comprehensive analysis of mortality-related health metrics associated with mental disorders: a nationwide, register-based cohort study" (The Lancet, 2019), and "Decomposing change in life expectancy: A bouquet of formulas in honor of Nathan Keyfitz’s 90th birthday" (Demography, 2003). Internationally acclaimed for his expertise in demography, Canudas-Romo has advanced understandings of the longevity revolution through alternative measures such as modal age at death and life expectancy, with notable media coverage of his findings on increased Australian life expectancy in the initial year of the COVID-19 pandemic.