Vladimir Shkolnikov, Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Magali Barbieri, Associate Director

University of California, Berkeley and INED, Paris

John Wilmoth, Founding Director

United Nations and formerly University of California, Berkeley

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements). The Center on the Economics and Development of Aging (CEDA) French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) has also supported the further development of the database in recent years.

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 39 countries or areas: