Overview and Welcome from Chair Mara Loveman
Dear Friends of Berkeley Demography,
Welcome!
In the face of ongoing global crises of health, increasing social inequality. ecological precarity, and racial injustice, we are doing everything we can to advance understanding of human population dynamics, train a new generation of scholars, and sustain our vibrant human and intellectual community.
The research focus of the department continues to thrive in its traditional strengths in formal modeling and demography theory. New hires and affiliations are growing our strengths in modeling population impacts of infectious diseases, innovative social network methods, economic demography, and the politics of demographic change. With the pandemic, we have also started a number of new projects to advance the social scientific understanding of the response to and impact of the coronavirus and other threats to human health in societies marked by severe inequality.
Our big news this year is that WE HAVE MOVED! Berkeley Demography’s new home is located on the 3rd floor of the Social Science Building. We are so grateful to the Dean of Social Sciences, Raka Ray, and to Campus Leadership, for providing resources to create a beautiful new space for our research and teaching to continue to thrive. Come check out our beautiful new digs when you are on Campus!
In other big news, an ambitious and dedicated group of our fantastic alumni have come together to organize a fundraising campaign to raise $100,000 to create a Demography Chair’s Endowment Fund. You can learn more about this exciting and much-appreciated initiative by sending an email to socialsciences@berkeley.edu. Once established, the Endowment will provide a sustained and reliable source of funds to support the Department’s community-building activities, graduate student research, conference travel, and new efforts to involve more UC Berkeley undergraduates in research opportunities in Demography.
Our weekly Brown Bag brings us together to learn about and discuss cutting edge demographic research. We feature speakers from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, and we are proud to sustain one of the most vibrant interdisciplinary spaces on Berkeley’s Campus.
Our brown bag talks are open to all, and we now meet in a hybrid format. If you would like to be added to the listserv to receive notices of talks held in person and via zoom, please write to: dmurphy(at)berkeley.edu.
We welcome inquiries and applications from students of diverse backgrounds who want to pursue an M.A. or Ph.D. in Demography or a joint Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology. We continue to receive strong support from our NIH-sponsored training programs and from Berkeley’s Graduate Division, which enable us to provide competitive funding support for students admitted to our Ph.D. program. For initial inquiries, please contact our Head Graduate Advisor, Monique Verrier at: moniquemarie_at_berkeley.edu
We love hearing from alumni and others with connections to Berkeley Demography about your research pursuits and other endeavors around the world. Please drop us a line when you have a chance and let us know about your latest pursuits or projects.
Yours sincerely,
Professor of Sociology and Demography
Demography Department Chair