John R. Wilmoth, Director

University of California, Berkeley

Vladimir Shkolnikov, Co-Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements).

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 37 countries or areas: