Wolfgang Lutz is the Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between the University of Vienna (where he is Professor at the Department of Demography), IIASA (where he is a Senior Advisor in the Population and Just Societies Program), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (where he is a Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography). He holds a PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Lutz has widely published on international population trends with a special focus on population forecasting, population-development-environment interactions, and introducing education as a standard demographic dimension in addition to age and sex. He has published over 280 scientific articles, including 24 in Science, Nature and PNAS. He also wrote or edited 27 books and special issues. His most recent book is ‘Advanced Introduction to Demography’ (E. Elgar, 2021).

He has won prestigious awards including the Wittgenstein Prize, two European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants, the Mattei Dogan award of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and the Mindel C. Sheps Award of the Population Association of America (PAA). 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 Europea. He was also appointed by the UN Secretary-General to be one of the 15 members of the Independent Group of Scientists to produce the quadrennial Global Sustainable Development Report 2019.