Albert Esteve Palós, demographer and researcher, is director of Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED – Centre for Demographic Studies) and associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). With a degree in Geography he also has a PhD in Demography from the UAB with a thesis titled Nomenclàtor del Censo de Població i la seva aplicació a l'estudi del poblament a Catalunya (Population Census Gazetteer Files and Their Application to the Study of Settlement in Catalonia). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Minnesota, the Institute National d’Études Démographiques in Paris and Princeton University. He has been a grant holder of the Department of Geography at the UAB for the University Teacher Training programme and of the Ramon i Cajal programme at the CED, in addition to obtaining research funding from the Spanish government’s National Plan for R&D, the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia, and the sixth and seventh European Union Framework Programmes. In 2009 he received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for the WorldFam project. His research is concerned with aspects related with couple formation, marriage markets and household structure, on both Spanish and worldwide scales. He has also made a significant contribution in research infrastructure projects, in particular with harmonisation and dissemination of population census microdata, in this case working closely with the Population Centre at the University of Minnesota. He has published chapters in several books and numerous articles which have been published in such magazines as Population Development Review, Demography, International Migration Review and Demographic Research.Ron Lesthaeghe's research has been in the various subfields of demography : historical, social and economic, and mainly covering populations of Europe and of sub-Saharan Africa. He has also done research in the fields of cultural change in Europe and of ethnicminorities studies. He is currently examining the Second Demographic Transition, which stresses the importance of ideational changes affecting demographic behavior related to the formation/dissolution of unions and marital/non-marital fertility behavior.
