Tirtosudarmo worked with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) from 1980, and is now retired since February 2017. He was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Brown University (1996–1997), Fellow-in-Residence 2000–2001 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Refugee Studies Center, Oxford University (Michaelmas Term, 2002), and Visiting Professor at the Research Institute of Language and Culture, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2003–2004). In March–April 2008, he became Visiting Researcher at KITLV, Leiden and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (July–September 2008). He got his PhD in Social Demography (1990) from the Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and has been publishing extensively in scientific and popular journals on political demography and the politics of population mobility in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He is also the author of Demografi-Politik Pembangunan di Indonesia: Dari Riau sampai Timor Timur (The Political Demography of Development in Indonesia: From Riau to East Timor, 1996); Mencari Indonesia: The Political Demography of Post-Suharto (Searching for Indonesia: The Post-Soeharto Political Demography, 2007); Mencari Indonesia 2: Batas-batas Rekayasa Sosial (Searching for Indonesia 2: The Limits of Social Engineering, 2010); From Colonization to Nation-State: The Politica-Demography of Indonesia (2013); and On the Politics of Migration: Indonesia and Beyond (2015), the revised version of which was published by Springer with the title “The Politics of Migration in Indonesia and Beyond” in 2018.
