About the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science

The Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science (LCDS) is the nucleus of demography to develop new ideas within academia, industry and governments.

 

By its launch in November 2019, LCDS has already raised around £13.8 Million ($17.4 Million USD) in grants, of which £10 Million comes from The Leverhulme Trust, with additional funds from Nuffield College and the European Research Council. The LCDS is led by Professor Melinda Mills. 

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Societies and economies face unprecedented global demographic challenges, including radical shifts in age structures, global aging, rapid population growth in some areas but decline in others, substantial sudden flows of migrants and refugees, diverse families and fertility patterns and population-related environmental threats. The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) will build an internationally recognized centre of demographic science that will disrupt, realign and raise the value of demography in science and society.

 

Our driving research question asks: How can we harvest and link classic and new types of data, alongside innovative approaches and methods to generate accurate, timely and effective demographic knowledge and predictions to resolve the most challenging demographic problems of our time? Bold research questions and objectives are divided into seven tightly interconnected research programmes of:

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1. Nowcasting: digital and computational demography,

2. Environmental context, demography and climate change,

3. Inequality and diversity,

4. Sociogenomics: nature and nurture

5. Causal demography,

6. Demography, society and global sustainability; and,

7. Ethics, truth and trust.

 

Producing real-time nowcasting of demographic processes – with a focus on inequality – diversity and environmental context, will revolutionize the discipline of demography. Our interdisciplinary approach unites top minds from the disparate disciplines of demography, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, geography, marketing, statistics, informatics, molecular genetics, and biology, to bring the ‘science’ into demography to accelerate and disrupt the discipline.

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