Academic Background
I am a student of Demography at UC Berkeley, originally from South-East England, and currently based just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, across the border in France.
PhD Candidate in Demography
University of California, Berkeley
2232 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704
email: fionaw(at)demog.berkeley.edu
Academic Background
I am a student of Demography at UC Berkeley, originally from South-East England, and currently based just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, across the border in France.
Until May 2010 I was employed as a part-time as a graduate student researcher, assisting with the production of documents that form part of the Human Mortality Database.
Since October 2010 I have been employed as an Associate Population Affairs Officer in the Population Unit of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. My work in the UNECE is primarily to do with ageing, as well as administration of the Generations and Gender Programme.
My current academic interests evolved from my undergraduate studies in Human Sciences at Wadham College, Oxford. I am a staunch supporter of the Human Sciences degree programme, which in my view is one of the few in the world which has genuinely grasped the concept of interdisciplinarity (as opposed to multidisciplinarity, which I think is something quite different). It was here that I was first introduced to demography, along with the many fields which help to contextualise the study of population: anthropology, sociology, social geography, genetics and evolution, ethology, physiology, human ecology.
I cemented my interest in the study of population and social justice at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I obtained a master's degree in Population and Development.
At UC Berkeley I have learned some of the fundamentals of demographic analysis, and completed oral field examinations in fertility and the history of population politics and policy. Within these fields, I have developed an interest in the fertility transitions of developing countries, theories of low fertility, the evolution and applicability of Demographic Transition and "Second Demographic Transition" concepts, and the long-standing debates about how best to conceptualise and measure individual and/or group-level fertility.
My interest in population and development and the evolution of population policy led me to spend the Summer of 2008 as an intern in the population and development branch of the technical division at UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund).
If you are interested in seeing my full resumé, you can download it here.
I am currently working on my PhD dissertation, in which I am investigating to what extent the socio-cultural similarities between the Southern European countries (especially Italy and Spain) and countries of the Latin American region might translate into similar national-level fertility trajectories. In particular I am asking whether the 'familism' frequently used to explain lowest-low fertility in the Mediterranean might be expected to contribute to similar outcomes in parts of Latin America.
The primary sources of data for this work are the World Values Survey. and the Latin American Public Opinion Project.
My dissertation advisor is Professor John Wilmoth.
Aside from demography and development, here are some of the things I care about and to which I devote my time:
