Staff Biographies | Paul Demeny

Profile

Paul Demeny has been Distinguished Scholar at the Population Council since 1989. He has served as the editor of the Council’s Population and Development Review, which he founded, since 1975. He was a vice president of the Council from 1973 to 1988. His research focuses on population policy, international migration, food security, and replacement fertility issues. Prior to joining the Council, he was founder and director of the East-West Population Institute in Honolulu and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, where he was also associate director of the Population Studies Center. With Council colleague Geoffrey McNicoll, he organized the 2002 Bellagio conference on “The political economy of global population change, 1950–2050.”

Among Demeny’s professional affiliations are the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he has been a Fellow since 1974; the Population Association of American, whose president he was in 1986; and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, which named him as Laureate in 2003. He is the recipient as well of the 2003 Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences (news release).

Invited lectures and professional engagements have taken Demeny overseas more than 180 times during the past four decades. He has consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of State, among others.