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Department of Demography

Core Demography Faculty

The Department of Demography's core faculty consists of Eugene Hammel, Michael Hout (Chair), Ronald Lee, Kenneth Wachter and John Wilmoth. A larger group of affiliated faculty participates in instruction and dissertation supervision. Dr. Carl Mason directs the Computer Lab for the Demography Department and for department affiliated research entities.


Eugene Hammel

Eugene Hammel picture Demography core faculty (emeritus), Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography affiliated faculty (emeritus), Anthropology faculty (emeritus).

Office Phone:

E-Mail: gene@demog.berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://demog.berkeley.edu/~gene

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.


Mike Hout

Mike Hout picture Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography Chair, Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography core faculty, Demography core faculty, Sociology faculty

Office Phone: (510) 643-6874

E-Mail: mikehout@berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/profiles/hout/

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.


Jennifer Johnson-Hanks

Jennifer Johnson-Hanks picture Demography core faculty, Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography core faculty, Sociology faculty.

Office Phone: (510) 643-5646

E-Mail: johnsonhanks@demog.berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~johnsonhanks

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.


Leora Lawton

Leora Lawton picture Executive Director, Berkeley Population Center, Demography Visiting Associate Professor/Sociology Lecturer

Office Phone: (510) 643-1270

E-Mail: llawton@berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://sociology.berkeley.edu/profiles/lawton/
Leora Lawton started out at UC Berkeley and received an AB in economics in 1978, then lived in Israel for 8 years where she completed an MA in Demography at the Hebrew University in 1985, and from there went to Brown University to earn a doctorate in sociology with an emphasis in social demography in 1991. After spending many years in the private sector as a survey research methodologist, Lawton returned to academia, although she still has an active consulting business, working with a variety of organizations on customer and employee relationships. In the sociology department she has taught Soc 117, Sports as a social institution; Soc 142, Deviance and social control and 2 undergraduate seminars in community-based research, conducting program evaluations for a local non-profit. Her research areas of late include work-family balance, but any area of family demography – especially intergenerational relations – is of interest.

Ronald Lee

Ronald Lee picture Demography core faculty, Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography core faculty, Economics Department faculty, Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) director.

Office Phone: (510) 642-4535

E-Mail: rlee@demog.berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://www.ceda.berkeley.edu/People/rlee.html

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 currently holds the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Endowed Chair in Economics. He has taught courses here in economic demography, population theory, population and economic development, demographic forecasting, population aging, immigration, indirect estimation, and research design, as well as a number of pro-seminars. Professor Lee is the Director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at U.C. Berkeley, funded by the National Institute of Aging.

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, an Honorary Doctorate, honoris causa, from Lund University, Sweden. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Corresponding member of the British Academy. He has held NIA MERIT Awards continuously from 1994 and will through 2013. He has chaired the population and social science study section for NIH and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population, and has served on both the National Advisory Committee on Aging (NIA Council) and the NICHD Council. In 2010-2012 he co-chairs a panel of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council on the Long term macroeconomic effects of population aging.

Professor Lee's current research focuses on intergenerational transfers and population aging. He co-directs with Andrew Mason the National Transfer Accounts project (NTA), which currently includes 36 collaborating countries. NTA estimates age patterns of labor income, consumption, savings, and public and private transfers, and the sources of economic support for children and older people. NTA sheds light on the economic consequences of changing population age distributions, particularly population aging. A separate project investigates the interrelations between intergenerational transfers and the evolution of life histories. He continues to work on modeling and forecasting demographic time series, and on Social Security. He enjoys tennis and hiking.


Carl Mason

Carl Mason picture Demography Lecturer, Demography Lab director, CEDA computing director, Berkeley Population Center computing director.

Office Phone: (510) 642-1255

E-Mail: carlm@demog.berkeley.edu

Lab Webpage: http://lab.demog.berkeley.edu/

Dr Mason holds an MS in Operations Research and a PhD in Economics, both from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include population micro simulation, immigration, urban economics, and population aging. His teaching areas include Computing methods and data analsys (Demography 213) and US immigration (Demography 145).


Kenneth Wachter

Kenneth Wachter picture Demography Chair, Demography core faculty, Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography core faculty, Statistics Department faculty.

Office Phone: (510) 642-1578

E-Mail: wachter@demog.berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~wachter
Professor Kenneth Wachter holds a joint appointment in Demography and Statistics. A graduate of Harvard, where he received his B.A. in History and Literature, he went on to Cambridge, where he finished his Ph.D. in Statistics. Professor Wachter teaches demographic methods, mathematical demography, and historical demography. He is working on new statistical methods for analyzing survey data on aging populations, and studying the implications of new work in biology and genetics for demographic understanding of longevity. His interest in family demography and kinship together with statistical and mathematical methods led to the development of SOCSIM, a demographic simulation program, which was developed jointly with Professor Hammel. Among other applications, SOCSIM can be used to forecast the number of kin people will have on average in the 21st century. Professor Wachter is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the recipient of the 1988 Sheps Award in Mathematical Demography, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Committee on Population of the National Research Council and the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America. He is an enthusiast of mysteries, poetry, beach walking, stargazing, swimming, and poodles.

John Wilmoth

John Wilmoth picture Demography core faculty, Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography core faculty, Graduate Advisor for Demography and Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography starting July 1, 2007,

Office Phone: (510) 642-9688

E-Mail: jrw@demog.berkeley.edu

Personal Webpage:http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~jrw/

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.



Visiting Faculty

Fall 2011

Robert Chung

Spring, 2012

Patrick Ball



Faculty Affiliated with the Demography Program

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