Core Demography Faculty

Professor Eugene Hammel (emeritus), completed his A.B. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hammel is the founder of the current Demography Department on the Berkeley campus. His main anthropological interests are social structure and kinship, techniques of empirical analysis, stratification, European peasant society, archaeology, evolutionary ecology, and anthropological linguistics. His main demographic interests are anthropological and historical demography and microsimulation techniques.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Wenner-Gren, NSF, the Social Science Research Council, recipient of the Berkeley Citation, the Moses Memorial Lectureship at Berkeley, the Harvey Lectureship at New Mexico, and similar awards and research grants. He has served as chair of the National Research Council Committee on Population, President of the American Ethnological Society, member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, chair of the Anthropology section at the National Academy of Sciences, member of the Advisory Committee in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at NSF, and similar national positions. He served as member and head of the executive committee of the Department of Anthropology, Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, co-founder of the Quantitative Anthropology Laboratory and Social Science Computing Laboratory, and de facto head of campus computing operations.

Although formally retired, he continues to pursue research and supervise graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and occasionally teachs formal courses. His hobby interests have included amateur radio, rock climbing, hiking, playing the guitar, wine and beer making, gardening, and Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

Professor Mike Hout earned a B.A. in History and Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from Indiana University. He taught at the University of Arizona for eight years before moving to Berkeley in 1985. He teaches courses on inequality and data analysis. In his research, Mike uses demographic methods to study social change in inequality, education, religion, and other sociological topics. He and Claude Fischer are currently writing a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States that exemplifies this approach. A couple of illustrative papers include "The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change" (Am. J. of Soc., Sept. 2001) and "How 4 Million Irish Immigrants Came to be 40 Million Irish Americans" (with Josh Goldstein, Am. Soc. Rev., April 1994). He wrote a book on Irish social mobility called Following iin Father's Footsteps (Harvard Univ. Press 1989) and, with five Berkeley colleagues, Inequality by Design (Princeton Univ. Press, 1996). In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Mike Hout is chair of the Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography.

Associate Professor Jennifer Johnson-Hanks received her BA from Berkeley
(1994) and her PhD from Northwestern (2000), both in Anthropology. She
joined the Berkeley department in 2000. Johnson-Hanks works on the
relationships between culture, institutions, and demographic change.
Particular interests include kinship, reproduction/fertility, and theories
of action. Her first book, Uncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an
African Crisis, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006.
Teaching areas include Fertility (220), Household and Family in
Comparative Perspective (165), and Anthropology and Demography (189).
Johnson-Hanks enjoys gardening and cooking.

Professor Ronald Lee holds an M.A. in Demography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He spent a postdoctoral year at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED, France). After teaching for eight years at the University of Michigan in the Economics Department and working at the Populations Studies Center, he joined Demography at Berkeley in 1979, with a joint appointment in Economics.

He has taught courses here in economic demography, population theory, population and economic development, demographic forecasting, population aging, indirect estimation, and research design, as well as a number of pro-seminars. Honors include Presidency of the Population Association of America, the Mindel C. Sheps Award for research in Mathematical Demography, the PAA Irene B. Taeuber Award for outstanding contributions in the field of demography. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Philosophical Society and a corresponding member of the British Academy . He has chaired the population and social science study section for NIH and is a former chair of the NAS Committee on Population. He has served on the National Advisory Council on Aging and currently serves on the National Advisory Child Health and Human Development Council. Professor Lee is the founding Director of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at UC Berkeley, funded by the National Institute of Aging. He has received MERIT awards from NIA for two projects.

His research projects include modeling and forecasting demographic time series, population aging and intergenerational transfers, evolutionary theory, and public pensions. He is married to Melissa L. Nelken and has three daughters. He enjoys tennis and hiking.

John Wilmoth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Demography and a researcher in the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging.  He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology.  He received a B.A. (1984; actuarial science and French) from Ball State University and went on to earn a Ph.D. (1988; statistics and demography) from Princeton University. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1990.  His teaching has included courses on the causes and consequences of population change, demographic and statistical methods, mortality trends and global health issues, and advances in human reproductive technologies.  Most of his published research concerns trends and variation in levels of human mortality and longevity, including a special focus on methods of demographic estimation.  He seeks to promote demographic research and teaching through the creation and maintenance of publicly accessible data resources, including the Human Mortality Database.  Other research interests include population projection methodologies, population aging, social security, international migration, and assisted reproductive technologies.  Prof. Wilmoth took a leave of absence from Berkeley during 2005-2007 while working for the Population Division of the United Nations in New York.