Webinar: When real is not enough: Synthetic Populations in research & policy
Dr Andreas Hoehn, University of Glasgow
🗓 Thursday 4 December 2025
🕛 12:30 pm | ⏱ 30–40 mins
Access to high-quality data on people and households is vital for understanding social, economic, and health issues — and for designing effective policies. Yet such detailed data are often hard to obtain for the UK, or don’t exist at the level needed for meaningful analysis. A Synthetic Population — a “digital twin” — offers a powerful way to address these gaps. It allows the swift identification of emerging issues, deepens our understanding of needs, and provides researchers and policymakers with a valuable new tool for exploring how different factors interact and how proposed policies might affect people and places.
In this webinar, Dr Andreas Hoehn, from our Synthetic Population work package, will introduce our work on creating a full-scale synthetic population for the UK. Drawing on recent census and survey data, he will explain how a dataset is built to represent individuals and households and, when combined with simulation models, offers a clearer picture of how the pieces of everyday life fit together and affect on another. For researchers and policymakers, the available prototypes already support a variety of exciting applications.
