On Monday 10 March 2025, the new Rector of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Prof. Alex Weissensteiner, will officially open the Academic Year 2024/25 in the Aula Magna of the unibz Bozen-Bolzano City Center campus.

The evening's guest of honour, Prof. Francesco Billari, will give the keynote speech on the topic of ‘The Challenges of Demography and Human Capital’.

Francesco Billari is professor of Demography and has been Rector of Bocconi University in Milan since November 2022. He has lectured at Oxford University (Department of Sociology, where he was also Director) and at Nuffield College (where he held a professorship) as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Director of Independent Research on Early Adulthood Demography). 

His main interests are fertility and family change, transition to adulthood, life-cycle analysis, population forecasting, digitalisation and demography, and comparative surveys. His work has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of demography, economics, epidemiology and public health, geography, sociology and statistics. He has been involved in numerous international projects and is currently the PI of the European Research Council Advanced Grant.

He was President of the European Association for Population Studies and received the ‘Clogg Award’ from the Population Association of America in 2012. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Population Studies Centre at the University of Pennsylvania.