WorldPop News

Graphic illustrating the potential impact of social, mobility and contact networks on infectious disease transmission.

How Our Social Connections Shape the Spread of Disease: What New Research Reveals

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In today’s interconnected world, a local outbreak can become a global crisis with remarkable speed. Planes link distant cities in hours, social media connects millions in seconds, and our daily routines weave together countless invisible threads of contact. A recent scoping review led by WorldPop PhD researcher Zhifeng Cheng and published in Infectious Diseases of […]

How Our Social Connections Shape the Spread of Disease: What New Research Reveals Read More »

Photo of Dr Sarchil Qader guiding Malawi NSO statisticians on ground data collection

First Automated Census-Mapping Workshop in Malawi a Success 

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WorldPop recently completed its first workshop on automated census mapping in Malawi, a milestone for the joint FCDO-funded project with the Malawi National Statistics Office (NSO) ahead of their 2028 national census. Led by Dr Sarchil Qader and Dr Aubrey Steingrabber over two intensive weeks, 22 NSO colleagues and 4 students from the University of

First Automated Census-Mapping Workshop in Malawi a Success  Read More »

Photo of Willemstad, Curacao

WorldPop Strengthens Regional Partnerships at CARICOM’s 50th Statistics Meeting in Curaçao

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In late October, WorldPop joined statistical leaders from across the Caribbean at the 50th meeting of the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Standing Committee on Caribbean Statistics in Willemstad, Curaçao. Deputy Director Ian Coady, Senior Enterprise Fellow Dr Natalia Garavito-Tejedor and Senior Programme Coordinator, Kathryn Baxter represented WorldPop at a moment when high-quality, accessible data is becoming

WorldPop Strengthens Regional Partnerships at CARICOM’s 50th Statistics Meeting in Curaçao Read More »

Photo of delegates at the Human Planet Forum, JRC Ispra, Italy - 19–21 November 2025

Progress in Population and Urban Data: Highlights from the Human Planet Forum 2025

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The 2025 Human Planet Forum gathered global experts in population modelling, urban analytics, and Earth observation for three days of scientific progress and growing collaboration. A central theme throughout the meeting was the acceleration of high-resolution, openly accessible global datasets and included a presentation by Professor Andy Tatem of our new, open Global 2 (2015-2030)

Progress in Population and Urban Data: Highlights from the Human Planet Forum 2025 Read More »

Animated GIF of Khartoum

WorldPop Global 2: A New Era of High-Resolution Population Data

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This week, WorldPop Director Professor Andy Tatem presented during the Monitoring, projecting and hindcasting of human settlements, infrastructure and population session at the Human Planet Forum 2025, introducing the next generation of WorldPop’s global population datasets: Global 2 (2015–2030). These new datasets represent a major step forward in how the world measures, understands, and anticipates

WorldPop Global 2: A New Era of High-Resolution Population Data Read More »

chart showing estimated spatiotemporal resolution of human mobility data sources

Movement, Population, and Infection: How Mobility Data Is Transforming Epidemic Modelling and Control

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Understanding how diseases spread in a connected world is one of the greatest challenges in modern public health. Traditional models (like the well-known Susceptible, Infectious, and Recovered (SIR) framework) often assume that everyone mixes uniformly, meaning each person has an equal chance of interacting with everyone else. But reality is far more complex. Human populations

Movement, Population, and Infection: How Mobility Data Is Transforming Epidemic Modelling and Control Read More »

Animation showing population distribution of Bogata under SSP1 scenario, 2025-2100

New Global 1 km Population Projections Released to Advance Climate and Health Research (Version 0.2)

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As part of the Wellcome-funded FuturePop project, WorldPop has recently released a new open access dataset. The data includes gridded global population distribution maps at ~1 km resolution (30 arc-seconds) for every 5-year interval from 2025 through 2100, under each of the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios (SSP1-5). The projections feed into the Coupled

New Global 1 km Population Projections Released to Advance Climate and Health Research (Version 0.2) Read More »

Photo of man wearing mask in street

Lessons from COVID-19: How Data and Modelling Evolved During the Pandemic

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A new MOnitoring Outbreaks for Disease surveillance in a data science context (MOOD) Horizon 2020 study published this week offers an insightful look at how disease modelling and data use changed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The research, led by Dr Esther van Kleef, Technical Consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO), with WorldPop’s Professor Andy

Lessons from COVID-19: How Data and Modelling Evolved During the Pandemic Read More »

Photo of Data Science Nigeria 2025 conference hall

The Future is Geospatial: Powering Africa’s Growth with Location Intelligence

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On Tuesday, October 21, Senior Research Fellow Dr. Chris Nnanatu delivered a keynote presentation at the 2025 Data Science Nigeria AI Bootcamp, where he spoke on a topic shaping Africa’s digital future: “The Future is Geospatial: Powering Africa’s Growth with Location Intelligence (LI).” Dr. Nnanatu explored how geospatial and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming

The Future is Geospatial: Powering Africa’s Growth with Location Intelligence Read More »

Photo of street scene in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Advancing Wastewater Surveillance and Population Mapping at Dhaka Stakeholder Engagement Meeting

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Dr Somnath Chaudhuri, Research Fellow at WorldPop, recently visited Dhaka to participate in a key stakeholder engagement meeting for the Gates Foundation-funded project Blue Line Tracing and Wastewater Surveillance in Dhaka. The initiative, a multi-institutional collaboration involving icddr,b (formerly known as the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), the University of Virginia, Imperial College

Advancing Wastewater Surveillance and Population Mapping at Dhaka Stakeholder Engagement Meeting Read More »

About Us

The WorldPop research programme, based in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton, is a multi-sectoral team of researchers, technicians and project specialists that produces data on population distributions and characteristics at high spatial resolution.

Initiated in October 2013 to combine The AfriPop Project, AsiaPop and AmeriPop projects, we have a diverse portfolio of projects, including large multi-million-pound collaborative projects with partner organisations, commercial data providers and international development organisations.

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  • University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom
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