About me

This is a work-related web site and therefore rather boring unless you are (perhaps even if you are) a demographer. It provides access to those of my publications that can be downloaded from the web (including several that are no longer readily available elsewhere). I have also linked up my CV to make it more meaningful. Other content may appear in due course. There are some photos of birds and boats and information on my family tree here: Personal webpages

I started my career in the software industry but began working in 1980 in what has been successively titled the Centre/Department of Population Studies/Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). My first degree is in social anthropology and I like to think of myself as a social scientist, although most of my work has been in quantitative demography. I did an MSc in Demography at LSE and completed a PhD at LSHTM on the estimation of adult mortality from data on orphanhood.

Since October 2021 I have been Emeritus Professor of Demography at LSHTM and I am also an Honorary Professor of the University of Cape Town based in the Centre for Actuarial Research.

Research Interests

Until about 20 years ago the most important focus of my research was adult health and mortality. I have written several papers on methods for measuring adult mortality in the developing world. My PhD thesis was on using orphanhood data for this. Subsequently, my work in this area focused mainly on how to use survey data to measure adult mortality in populations with high AIDS mortality. I contributed a number of chapters to the IUSSP/UNFPA manual on demographic estimation. As well as working on methods, I have produced several substantive papers on adult mortality and AIDS mortality in Africa and became involved for a while in work on the burden of disease.

From 1999 to 2010 I contributed to the work of the UNAIDS/WHO Reference Group on Estimates, Modelling and Projections, in particular developing the methods used by UNAIDS to estimate and project numbers of AIDS orphans.

One theme of my research since the turn of the century has been the investigation of the interplay of demographic and poverty dynamics in South Africa. Along with Julian May and others, I was responsible for the 2004 wave of the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study. The ADaPT project used these and other longitudinal data to investigate the social and economic impact of AIDS epidemic in South Africa. I have also published papers on inequalities in children’s health and educational outcomes in the country and on the relationship between girl’s schooling and teenage childbearing.

I also have a long-standing research interest in the transition to low fertility in Africa. In particular, in a series of papers Tom Moultrie and I have documented that this differs from most Eurasian declines in being characterized by the postponement or curtailment of further childbearing by women of all ages and parities, rather than by parity-specific family size limitation. Recently, I have been having another look at the Own-Children Method for estimating age-specific fertility and differential fertility from Census data, most notably at methods for combining it with women’s answers to summary questions about their children ever-born in order to estimate full birth histories.

My past research into population issues in Britain concentrated on investigating the changing size and characteristics of populations of particular importance for health and social policy, such as older people and children in local authority care. More recently, I published a paper on ethnic differentials in mortality in England and Wales.