On Becoming a Mathematical Demographer—And the Career in Problem-Focused Inquiry that Followed

Abstract

I greatly appreciate this opportunity to reflect on my career. Looking back over five decades of involvement in demographic and sociological scholarship, I have tried to say a bit about my personal life and my work—from developing mathematical models of fertility early on, to applying lessons from those models to empirical work in the United States, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the developing world, to involvement in evaluations of health and population interventions. Equally important to me have been the building of research capacity and involvement in program and policy development. So much remains for new generations of scholars to do, but my hope is that, in choosing their own directions, they—and sociology as a whole—will take as their mission examining issues of societal importance around the world.