ERC Starting Grant for Ester Lazzari
7 SEP 2026
In the ERC-funded project MINDREP, demographer Ester Lazzari and her team will investigate how mental wellbeing influences people’s childbearing preferences and outcomes. The five-year project will draw on large longitudinal studies from nine countries. By following individuals over time and combining psychological measures with biological markers, it will examine how the full spectrum of mental health, from positive wellbeing to poor functioning, relates to reproductive trajectories and the pathways underlying these relationships. A particular focus will be on social inequalities: does mental health contribute to differences in reproductive outcomes across socioeconomic groups? The cross-country perspective will also allow the team to explore how these relationships vary across different institutional contexts. In doing so, MINDREP aims to place mental health more centrally in the study of contemporary fertility behaviour.
About Ester Lazzari:
Ester Lazzari is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Demography at the University of Vienna and a member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. She completed her PhD in Demography at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2022. Her research focuses on reproductive behaviour in contemporary societies, with particular attention to how biological and health factors shape fertility outcomes. The ERC Starting Grant will enable her to establish her first independent research team at the University of Vienna.
(University of Vienna, 2026, https://www.univie.ac.at/en/news/press-room/press-releases/detail/2-erc-starting-grants-for-the-university-of-vienna)
The Wittgenstein Centre aspires to be a world leader in the advancement of demographic methods and their application to the analysis of human capital and population dynamics. In assessing the effects of these forces on long-term human well-being, we combine scientific excellence in a multidisciplinary context with relevance to a global audience. It is a collaboration among the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the University of Vienna.