Professor Emeritus Dr Herwig Birg gained his doctorate in political science at the Free University in Berlin in 1970, and his postdoctoral qualification in the Department of Social Sciences and Planning at the Technische Universität, Berlin in 1979. He was Professor of Demographics and Managing Director of the Institut für Bevölkerungsforschung und Sozialpolitik at the University of Bielefeld from 1981 to 2004. Until 2004 he was President of the German Society for Demography. From 1997 to 2008 he was a Trustee of the Federal Institute for Population Research. He is a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Population, recipient of the August Lösch Prize, a member of national and international learned societies, and has conducted research and taught in Indonesia. Since 2009 he has been a member of the Committee on Demography of the Government of Saxony-Anhalt. His publications include: World Population Projections for the 21st Century (1995); Die Weltbevölkerung (2nd edn., 2004); Die demographische Zeitenwende (4th edn., 2005); and Die ausgefallene Generation (2nd edn., 2006).