Wolfgang Lutz was born in Rome and went to school in Munich, Saarbrücken, and Vienna. He holds a Ph.D. in demography from the
University of Pennsylvania (1983) and a Habilitation (second doctorate) in statistics from the
University of Vienna. He also received an Honorary Doctorate from the
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Lutz has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, and population projection as well as the interaction between population and the environment. He is a leading academic in the field of population and sustainable development and was one of the scientists appointed by the UN to write the Global Sustainable Development Report 2019. He also serves as special advisor to the Vice-President of the European Commission,
Dubravka Šuica. He has authored a series of world population projections produced at IIASA and developed approaches for projecting education and
human capital. Lutz is also the principal investigator of the Asian Meta Centre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis and a professorial affiliate research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. He is the author and editor of 28 books and more than 290 refereed articles, including 24 in
Science and
Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In 2009, and again in 2016, he received a
European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, in 2009 the Mattei Dogan Award of the
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), in 2010 the
Wittgenstein Award, (often referred to as "Austria's Nobel Prize"), in 2016 the Mindel C. Sheps Award of the
Population Association of America, and in 2023 the Science Prize of the Austrian Research Association. He is a member of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences, the
German National Academy Leopoldina, the
US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the
World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the
Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters, and the
Academia Europaea. In 2021 he published “Advanced Introduction to Demography” in which he summarizes the foundations and applications of multi-dimensional demography – a field pioneered by Lutz – which captures population dynamics not only by the conventional age and sex structures, but also by other demographic dimensions such as educational attainment and labor force participation. In 2024 he received the
Yidan Prize for Education Research. ==Selected publications==