The people following ten million lives
Behind every estimate on this site is a team linking century-old census pages to modern death records — and asking what the answers mean for policy today.
Jason Fletcher
Principal Investigator, UW–Madison
Jason Fletcher is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs in the La Follette School that specializes in health economics, economics of education, and child and adolescent health policy.
His research is focused on social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, which combines genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness and examining how in utero and early life conditions affect later life health, cognition, and mortality.
Hamid Noghanibehambari
Core researcher, Austin Peay State University
Hamid Noghanibehambari is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the College of Business at Austin Peay State University and a research affiliate of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at UW–Madison.
Working at the intersection of health economics, environmental economics, and the economics of education, he is co-author of most of the project’s studies linking early-life exposures — from lead pipes to school laws — to old-age longevity.
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas
Core researcher, UW–Madison
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the La Follette School and an affiliate of the UW–Madison Center for Demography and Ecology. An applied population economist, he studies mortality inequality, fertility, and the measurement of health disparities.
Trained at the Toulouse School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, he brings formal demographic methods to the project — including the cohort life-expectancy forecasts behind the team’s recent BMJ Open study. He serves as associate editor of the European Journal of Ageing.
Jiaxin Shi
Research Collaborator, HKUST
Jiaxin Shi is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining HKUST, he was a postdoctoral researcher on this project at UW–Madison and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
A formal demographer, he studies lifespan inequality and the social demography of mortality — asking not just how large longevity gains are, but how evenly they are shared across a population.
Joshua Goldstein
Research Collaborator, UC Berkeley
Joshua Goldstein is Chancellor’s Professor of Demography at UC Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Population Center, and a collaborator on the project’s NIH grant. He previously served as executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
He leads the CenSoc project, which built the linked census–Social Security mortality data infrastructure that makes research like ours possible — the bridge between the census pages of 1940 and the death records of today.
FEATURED PUBLICATION – BMJ OPEN, 2026
Life expectancy gains across US states between 1941 and 2000: a cohort study
Pifarré i Arolas, Andrade & Fletcher forecast universal cohort life-expectancy gains across all U.S. states, sexes, and birth cohorts — a two-phase story of rapid mid-century convergence followed by a stall, challenging claims of radically widening state disparities.
Funding
The American Mortality Project is supported by the National Institute on Aging, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Kohl Initiative.