Academic Profile

José Manuel Aburto is a demographer with the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and the Department of Sociology. He is also Brass Blacker associate professor of demography at LSHTM. 

He joined Oxford to hold the Newton International and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships. He received his MA in Demography at El Colegio de México, and PhD in Demography at the University of Southern Denmark and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in 2020.

The overarching aim of his research is to produce novel insights on population health inequalities and better understand the link between health inequalities and social determinants of health through core demographic concepts. Theoretically and methodologically, his work follows two main strands. First, he develops and advances formal demographic techniques to measure inequalities in the length of life, and uses this perspective to generate new ways of analysing population health. Second, through these and other methodological tools, he examines the structural and social determinants of population health inequalities. His work so far has examined how structural shocks like violence, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, affect population health inequalities around the globe.