Arun Balachandran

Dr. Arun Balachandran is a postdoctoral research scientist working with Dr. Dan Belsky at the Robert N Butler Columbia Aging Center. He received his PhD in demography from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2020. He did his pre-doctoral training at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, India, and has a background in the discipline of economics with a master’s degree from the Madras School of Economics, India. He worked towards 'Population Ageing in Europe and Asia: Beyond Traditional Perspectives' during his Ph.D., where he developed new measures of population ageing for comparisons across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on gender. Currently, he is working with Dr. Dan Belsky as they are developing new biomarker and population-based measures to population aging across countries in the world using longitudinal data.

His research interests are interdisciplinary and intersects across demography, population ageing, quantitative methodology and gender. His works has been published in Ageing & Society, Journal of Ageing and Health, SSM-Population Health, Economic & Political Weekly and The Lancet. He was awarded the KB Pathak Memorial Award for by the Indian Association for Study of Population for methodological innovation. Previously, he has worked with the University of Maryland College Park and with the Population Council. At the University of Maryland, he was involved in the design and implementation of a unique longitudinal database in the Global South- the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), which is the only nationally representative longitudinally survey on social, health and development indicators.