Francesco Billari, the Demographer Is Back

"It's such an exciting task". Francesco Billari is talking about his new assignment as Dean of the Faculty. "It is an honor to perform the task of attracting the best minds to an institution that I feel strongly about". When he was a child, though, Billari did not think about an academic career. He imagined for himself a job at an international organization, "to make the world a better place, a teenage dream".

He discovered Demography while studying Economics at Bocconi University. "It seemed to me a good way to combine my passions into one job: international politics, quantitative methods, and geography. It offered me a lens with which to study the world using the scientific method, and then try to think how to better it". After a Ph.D. in Padua, Billari flew to Germany where he was a junior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. It was a unique and highly educational experience. The institute puts junior researchers at the head of a team and provides them with funds and the chance to hire research workers. "It is a risky and rewarding practice, a model that should be imitated across the globe".

In 2002, he returned to Bocconi where he stayed for ten years. He was the first Director of the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics, Director of the M.Sc. in Economics and Social Sciences, Vice Rector of Development during Tabellini's rectorate. In 2017 he's now back at Bocconi, coming from the University of Oxford. When asked about what he finds gratifying about his job, he says "seeing former students flourish". He aims to fulfill his "intellectual duty to rely on solid facts and to get rid of wrong stereotypes and alternative truths". And maybe one day to write a book like Massimo Livi Bacci's A Concise History of World Population, "the fascinating course of the world seen through the eyes of a demographer".