Melinda Mills, MBE, FBA
Centre Director and Nuffield Professor of Sociology (Oxford)
Melinda Mills’ main research areas are combining a social science and genetic approach to the study of behavioural outcomes, with a focus on reproduction (fertility), chronotype, nonstandard, precarious employment and assortative mating. She joined the University of Oxford in 2014 and was previously at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2006-2014), Free University Amsterdam (2002-2005) and Bielefeld University, Germany (2000-2002). She holds a PhD in Demography (Groningen) and a Master and Bachelor of Arts in Sociology (University of Alberta, Canada).
She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, the ERC Advanced Grant CHRONO and the ERC Proof of Concept Grant and social business enterprise DNA4Science. She was the PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant SOCIOGENOME and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods SOCGEN project as well as the Editor in Chief of the European Sociological Review and International Sociology. She is on the Executive Council of the UKRI/ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and the Supervisory Board (Raad van Toezicht) of the Dutch National Science Council (NWO).
Mills has published 7 books and over 100 articles in the highest academic journals across multiple scientific disciplines including Nature Genetics, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Annual Review of Sociology, JAMA Psychiatry, Journal of Marriage and Family and Social Forces. Her books on globalization, uncertainty and life course have garnered considerable citations, as has her work on fertility and reproductive behaviour. She has written 2 statistical textbooks, Introducing Survival and Event History Analysis (in R) (2011) and An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis (MIT, 2020). Mills has supervised over 20 PhD students, 50 Master students and around 15 postdoctoral researchers.
Contact
2020
Principal Investigator, ERC Proof of Concept Grant, Value of award: 150,000 (10/2020-04/2022)
2020
Co-Investigator, John Fell OUP Research Fund: Demographic science and COVID-19 in the UK. Amount awarded: £49,981. With Dowd, J.B. (PI) and Rotondi, V., Rahal, C., Mills, MC., Kashyap, R. and Block, P.
2020
Co-Applicant, CanD3: Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-making, Value of Award: $2.5 Million, SSHRC, Canada (09/2020-09/2025)
2019
Principal Investigator, ERC Advanced Grant, CHRONO: Chronotype, health and family: The role of biology, socio- and natural environment and their interaction. Value of Award: €2.5 million (11/2019-11/2024)
2019
Principal Investigator, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. The Leverhulme Trust. Value of award: £10 million + ~£3 million matching (09/2019-09/2029)
RESEARCH GRANTS AWARDED (since 2019)
Mills, M.C. Clifford C. Clogg Award for Mid-Career Achievement, Population Association of America, 2020. Watch Youtube film.
AWARDS (since 2019)
DEGREES GRANTED
PhD Demography, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts, Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada, 2000
RECENT TALKS
Webinair: Face masks work! COVID Conversations, Oxford University, 22 July 2020. Watch on the Oxford University website.
Using demographic science to understand COVID-19, Bocconi University Seminar, Italy, 27 May 2020.