Wolfgang Lutz is Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. A collaboration between the Department of Demography of the University of Vienna, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (VID/ÖAW). He joined IIASA in October 1985, where he is Program Director of the World Population (POP) Program. Since 2002 he is also Director of VID and since 2008, Full Professor of Applied Statistics first at WU Vienna and since October 2019 at University of Vienna. He is also Professorial Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin School for 21st Century Studies. In 2016, before leaving office, former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Wolfgang Lutz to be one of 15 independent scientists to draft a report on sustainable development ahead of a global review set for 2019.

Professor Lutz studied philosophy, theology, mathematics and statistics at the Universities of Munich, Vienna and Helsinki and holds a PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania (1983) as well as a second doctorate (Habilitation) in Statistics from the University of Vienna.