Aliakbar Akbaritabar

Aliakbar Akbaritabar (also known as Ali) is a Research Scientist and Deputy Head of Training at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany. He works within the Laboratory of Migration and Mobility, which is part of the Digital and Computational Demography research group led by Prof. Emilio Zagheni.

Dr. Akbaritabar holds two PhD degrees: one in economic sociology and labor studies from the University of Milan, and another in sociology (social welfare) from the Allameh Tabataba'i University of Tehran. Prior to joining MPIDR, he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the German Competence Network for Bibliometrics.

As a computational social scientist with a background in sociology, Dr. Akbaritabar's research focuses on the science of science, scholarly migration, social networks, collaboration networks, and computational social science. His work re-purposes bibliometric data to answer social science and demographic questions, with particular interest in understanding migration and mobility patterns of scholars globally. He employs computational tools and techniques to address social scientific questions, bridging the gap between data science and sociological inquiry.

Dr. Akbaritabar's recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on global scholarly migration patterns, gender disparities in academic mobility, and methodological approaches in quantitative social science. His work often involves large-scale data analysis of scientific publications and researcher movements across international borders, revealing significant insights about the structure and dynamics of the global academic system. He has developed innovative approaches to analyzing scholarly migration using bibliometric data and has made substantial contributions to understanding the relationship between collaboration and mobility in academia.

Dr. Akbaritabar is actively involved in promoting computational approaches in social science research and has developed resources for using R Markdown, Git, and GitHub for academic writing. He maintains a public calendar of Computational Social Science events worldwide and shares his research through platforms like BlueSky, Twitter, and Mastodon.

As Deputy Head of Training at MPIDR, Dr. Akbaritabar plays a key role in developing training programs for researchers, particularly focusing on computational methods in demographic research. His laboratory work centers on analyzing migration and mobility patterns of scholars using bibliometric data, contributing significantly to our understanding of global knowledge production and academic collaboration networks. He is also involved in several major projects including the Migration and Mobility of Scholars initiative and the Scholarly Migration Database project.