CPOP Members

Linda J. Waite, Chair

Professor of Sociology

Population Research Center

The University of Chicago

Linda J. Waite is Lucy Flower professor of urban sociology and professor of sociology, Department of Sociology, Population Research Center, the University of Chicago. She is also director of the Center on Aging, NORC. Her current research interests include: social demography, aging, the family, health, working families, the link between biology, psychology, and the social world. She has conducted a pioneering study on marriage, which argues that marriage changes people’s behavior in ways that promote economic, emotional and physical well-being. She also has studied the decision to cohabit, the transition from cohabitation to marriage and the characteristics of cohabiting unions. She has examined the role of religious participation over the life course and the lives of working couples with children. She has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Michigan.

Christine Bachrach

Visiting Scholar

Social Science Research Institute

Duke University

Christine Bachrach is a visiting scholar at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University and research professor in the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland. She previously served as acting associate director for Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and acting director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health, and as chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Her scientific interests and publications span the areas of fertility, family formation, marriage and divorce, adoption, sexual behavior, contraceptive practice, population health, and survey methodology. Her current research focuses on the measurement and integration of cultural schemas in social demography. She is president-elect of the Population Association of America, co-directs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health and Society Scholars Program and has chaired the Sociology of Population Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2009 she received the Robert J. Lapham Award from the Population Association of America. A demographer by training, Dr. Bachrach received her M.A. in sociology from Georgetown University and her Ph.D. in population dynamics from John Hopkins University.

Jere R. Behrman

Professor of Economics

University of Pennsylvania

Peter J. Donaldson

President

The Population Council

Peter J. Donaldson was appointed as the president of the Population Council by its board of trustees in January 2005. Prior to that, he served as vice president and director of the International Programs Division, the Council’s largest division, and also served as acting president prior to becoming president. He was the chief executive officer of the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau and served as director of the Committee on Population of the National Research Council. He was a Council staff associate in Thailand and a representative in South Korea. He spent eight years at Family Health International in North Carolina, where he served ultimately as director of development and government relations. He has also worked on the Population Council as a senior associate and regional director for South and East Asia, located in Thailand. Dr. Donaldson served on the board of directors of the Population Association of America, the council of the population section of the American Sociological Association, and as a member of the advisory committee of the Institute of Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Bangkok. He has written or edited six books and numerous articles for both scientific and popular publications on population, development, and Asian affairs. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.

Kathleen Mullan Harris

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James E. Haar distinguished professor of sociology and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family demography, the transition to adulthood, health disparities and family formation. She is director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a longitudinal study of the social, behavioral, and biological linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. She was awarded the 2004 Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America and was president of the Population Association of America in 2009. She received her Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mark D. Hayward

Professor and Director

Population Research Center

University of Texas at Austin

Mark D. Hayward is a professor of sociology, Centennial Commission professor in the Liberal Arts, and director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He is former president of the Southern Demographic Association and chair-elect of the Aging and Life Course section of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Hayward's primary research interests center on the influence of life course exposures and events on the morbidity and mortality experiences of the older population. Presently, he is involved in several studies focusing on the origins of health disparities at older ages: early life influences on socioeconomic, race and gender disparities in adult morbidity and mortality; the demography of race/ethnic and gender disparities in healthy life expectancy; social inequality in the biomarkers of aging; and the health consequences of marriage, divorce, and widowhood. Recent publications have focused on changes in morbidity and mortality determining trends in healthy life expectancy, socioeconomic and race/ethnic differences in healthy life expectancy, the association between childhood health and adult morbidity, and the socioeconomic origins of the race gap in chronic disease morbidity. His recently published work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Demography, the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Social Science and Medicine. He has served on the boards of the Population Association of America and the Society of Biodemography and Social Biology, and he was a member and then chair of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research council. Dr. Hayward received his Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University.

Charles Hirschman

Boing International Professor

Department of Sociology

University of Washington

Charles Hirschman is Boeing International professor in the Department of Sociology and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Previously he taught at Duke University and at Cornell University. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses he conducts research on immigration and ethnicity in the United States and on social change in Southeast Asia. He currently directs the University of Washington-Beyond High School project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults. He is the author of several books, and has written more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters. He has been elected president of the Population Association of America (2005), chair of Section K (Social, Economic, and Political Sciences) of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (2004-05), and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Malaya (1984), Australian National University (1985), the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1993-94), the Russell Sage Foundation (1998-99) and the Population Reference Bureau (2005-06). He also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a rural village in Malaysia from 1965 to 1967. He has a B.A. from Miami University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wolfgang Lutz

Leader

World Population Program

International Institute for Applied

  Systems Analysis

Wolfgang Lutz is founding director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a new collaboration between International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the WU-Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is also director of the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor of Applied Statistics at the WU, and professorial research fellow at the Oxford Martin School for 21st Century Studies. He has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projection, and the interaction between population and environment. He has been conducting a series of in-depth studies on population-development-environment interactions in Mexico, several African countries, and Asia. He is the author of the series of world population projections produced at IIASA and has developed approaches for projecting education and human capital. He is also principal investigator of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. Lutz is author and editor of 28 books and more than 200 refereed articles, including 8 in Science and Nature. He has a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a second doctorate (habilitation) from the University of Vienna.

Robert D. Mare

Professor

Department of Sociology

University of California, Los Angeles

Robert D. Mare is professor of sociology and founding director of the California Center for Population Research. He was the 2010 president of the Population Association of America (PAA). He is widely known for his contributions to social demography in five major areas: models of educational stratification; marriage markets and assortative mating; statistical methods; neighborhood change; and population models of stratification. He has been widely recognized for his scholarship and played a number of important roles in professional associations. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral and Social Sciences, a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Lazarsfeld Memorial Award. He has also served in a number of posts at the University of Wisconsin, UCLA, and PAA and as editor of the journal Demography. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Sara S. McLanahan

Professor of Siologoy and Public Affairs

Office of Population Research

Princeton University

Sara S. McLanahan is the William S. Tod professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. She is a faculty associate of the Office of Population Research and the founder and director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. She is principal investigator of the Fragile Families Study and editor-in-chief of The Future of Children, a journal dedicated to providing research on policies to improve child health and wellbeing. She is a past president of the Population Association of America, and has served on the boards of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and currently serves on the boards of the William T. Grant Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson "Health and Society Scholars" program. She is the author of many articles and books including Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement (1998); Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994); and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (1986). She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Barbara Boyle Torrey

Guest Researcher

National Institute on Aging

Barbara Boyle Torrey is a guest researcher at the National Institute of Aging, Division of Behavioral and Social Research and a recent visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau. She was previously the Executive Director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Research Council from 1993 to 2002. Prior to her work at the NRC, Ms. Torrey was President of the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit center of national and international population research and information dissemination. Ms. Torrey's other previous positions include serving as Chief of the Center for International Research at the Bureau of the Census, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Income Security Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, fiscal economist at the Office of Management and Budget, and a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa. She has published a number of articles on the microeconomics of aging, global population and environmental issues in developing countries, and income and poverty trends in industrial countries in such journals as Science, Nature and the American Economic Review. She has edited 3 books on vulnerable populations in the U. S., on population and land use in developing countries and on Canadian and U.S. social differences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has served on the boards of the Luxembourg Income Study, the Population Association of America and the Executive Council of the AAAS. She is currently on the board of The Stanley Medical Research Foundation, and is on the Science Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. She is currently a member of the NRC Committee on Population and was a past member of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (now known as the Board on Environmental Change and Society). She received her B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University.

Maxine Weinstein

Distinguished Professor

Center for Population and Health

Georgetown University

Maxine Weinstein is distinguished professor of population and health at Georgetown University, where she has been since 1987. Her work explores the behavioral and biological dimensions of reproduction and aging. She is principal investigator, along with Noreen Goldman, of the Taiwan project, a study that explores the reciprocal relations among stress, health, and the social environment among the elderly. She also heads the MIDUS II biomarker study at Georgetown. She holds a B.S. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

David R. Weir

Research Professor

Survey Research Center

Institute for Social Research

University of Michigan

David R. Weir is research professor in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and director of the NIA-funded Health and Retirement Study. His current research interests include the use of longitudinal data to study chronic disease processes; health care decision-making at older ages; the role of personality factors in lifetime economic success; and the use of biomarkers in population surveys. He currently serves on the NRC Panel on Policy Research and Data Needs to Meet the Challenge of Aging in Asia and served on the Planning Committee for Academies-wide Initiative on the Grand Challenges of an Aging Society. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

John R. Wilmoth

Associate Professor

Department of Demography

University of California, Berkeley

John R. Wilmoth is a professor in the Department of Demography of the University of California at Berkeley, and a researcher in Berkeley's Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology. From 2005 until 2007, he worked for the Population Division of the United Nations. He is the director of the Human Mortality Database (HMD), a project co-sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. Most of his research concerns the increase in human longevity that has occurred during the past 250 years. This research has also included a special emphasis on developing better sources of information about historical patterns and trends in human mortality and life expectancy. He participated in the 2003 Social Security Advisory Board’s Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods. He has a Ph.D. in statistics and demography from Princeton University.