Orsola Torrisi

---

Orsola Torrisi is a social demographer and a Post-doctoral Associate at NYUAD Social Science Division. For her PhD, Orsola studied at the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Before joining NYUAD, she was an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She attended the European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) as an Associate of the Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense.

Her research focuses primarily on the demography of crises and violence. She is particularly interested in issues of family formation (fertility and marriage) and family violence (intimate partner violence) in the context of armed conflict and disasters. Her second research strand focuses on the development of new methods to measure adult and adolescent mortality in settings where data is scarce, including in populations affected by armed violence.

With her research, she aims (i) to expand knowledge on how crises and uncertainty due to violence and disasters affect demographic processes and (ii) to advance demographic data collection efforts to ensure that good quality research can be conducted in unstable settings.

Her work is interdisciplinary. She combines theoretical approaches from population studies, economics, and sociology with standard demographic, causal and spatial methods. Her primary research focuses on low- and middle-income settings experiencing socio-economic and demographic changes, particularly in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Still she has also conducted research on Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe.