Michael Topping

@MasoudMovahed @UCSB @Penn @PennPSC @EmilioParrado1 Congrats, Masoud! 🎉

Dissertation sent to the committee 😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅

@MillyYYang Congrats, Milly! 🎉

@caseyfbreen @n_seltzer Congrats, Casey! 🎉

New in PDR! Happy to see this one out. (Joint w/ @n_seltzer) Structured Inequality, Uncertain Lifespans: Demographic Perspectives on Predicting Individual-Level Longevity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pa…

Academia is like high school. There are the cool kids doing research that everyone talks about, and it's pretty hard to get into those circles.

@AngYu_soci It’s so hard some days 😅

Is social science always this hard, or is it just when you make your assumptions explicit? Always like this

@DrEmmaZang Congrats! 🎉

First great news in the Year of the Horse 🐎 Z-CAFE has received another Russell Sage Foundation grant to build a new neighborhood disadvantage index integrating multimodal data (images, text, and surveys) using AI and to examine how these structural conditions shape educational disparities in North Carolina.

Ho bisogno di un ferragosto a febbraio 😅😉

Renewed my passport on Sunday only to get it 5 days later??! (Instead of the 4-6 weeks). I’ll take a win when I can get one!

The hardest part of the PhD is not the dissertation writing and research (that's the fun part) -- it's the bureacracy, instability, and fight for funding.

@ufsoc Congrats, Fumiya! 🎉

Forthcoming in Population and Development Review

Today is somewhat symbolic! It's my last first day of the semester as a student (I hope!) 😅

I get so triggered as a demographer anytime I see someone make comments about population growth when fertility is low 🤯😤

2025 is 100% complete! Thank you all so much for following, and I hope you have a nice 2026.

I can't remember where I saw this, but if life is like a TV show, I very much would like a trailer for the 2026 season, especially after a particularly stressful 2025 with many twists and turns around every corner 😅

Devo staccare la spina 😅

Grad students are the most maligned people in our society today

Having a good supervisor makes all the difference

@DrEmmaZang As a student I *really* appreciate department staff! They are just as important as our committees!

Unpopular Academic Advice #3: With the holidays approaching, here’s a piece of academic wisdom that doesn’t get emphasized enough: Build real relationships with your department’s staff. Back in my Duke days (before the era of Interfolio), our amazing staff member Lisa manually submitted recommendation letters for all 80+ of my job applications (I was applying across multiple disciplines… another story for another time!). She never made a single mistake. That kind of behind-the-scenes labor is invisible but absolutely essential. One of my mentors, Professor Kenneth Land, taught me to never take staff for granted. Ken is not only a brilliant scholar but also one of the warmest, most grounded people I’ve met in academia. Every year, he took the staff out for lunch to show appreciation. I’ve followed his lead and now take our staff out for coffee from time to time. It’s a small gesture, but one that genuinely matters. As we close the semester, a gentle reminder: academia runs on people whose names may not appear on our papers, but whose support makes those papers possible. A sincere thank you goes a long way.

I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. *screams for two hours, takes a deep breath* I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish this PhD. I'm gonna finish-