Yan Yu, recently appointed as a Research Fellow in ADSRI has been awarded the Dorothy S. Thomas Award of the Population Association of America. The award is presented annually for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic and demographic variables.

In announcing the winner, Professor Patrick Heuveline, the Chair of the committee said:

The committee has selected for the 2009 Award a paper on the secular trend in body weight and its relationship to mortality. This study uses recalled weight at age 25 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) to document how mortality differentials and levels changed over time in the US female population. The author documents in particular how the difference in life expectancy at age 25 between normal-weight women and overweight or obese women has widened between 1976 and 2004 to 57.1 years for the former category versus 50.4 years for the latter ones. During the same period, the author even estimates that life expectancy at age 25 has declined by 1.2 years for overweight or obese women. Committee members were unanimously impressed by the careful analyses underlying these results, and by their obvious significance.