Hamidreza Zoraghein

Hamidreza Zoraghein conducts research on the intersections of population, environment, and climate change and is an expert on spatial analysis and population modeling.

At the Population Council, Zoraghein co-leads a demographic modeling project for human and environmental research and helps spearhead the Community Demographic Model (CDM), a set of tools that provide computer simulations of population dynamics and change. CDM has been widely adopted to investigate the relationships between population, economic, climate, and environmental changes.

Zoraghein also carries out research, supported by the European Commission, to illustrate the nuances of population distribution with major applications in global urbanization and human–environment dynamics. He contributes to the COVID-19 forecast hub of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, collaborating with the University of Colorado Boulder on high resolution spatiotemporal forecasting of COVID-19 incidence using machine learning.

Prior the Council, Zoraghein was a research scientist at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver’s Joseph Korbel School of International Studies. He was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In these roles, Zoraghein developed quantitative models for large-scale demographic projections. He also contributed to the Integrated Multisector, Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project, supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Zoraghein earned a PhD in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published more than 12 peer-reviewed papers, technical reports, policy briefs, and book chapters and presented more than 15 scientific papers internationally.