The Fred H. Bixby Forum:
A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Changes on a Divided Planet
Held on Jan. 23 and 24, 2009, in Berkeley, California
Each day's presentations and discussions have been webcast. Presenters' PowerPoint slides are included with their remarks. (See below for participants' and presenters' names and biographies.)
Day 1: Human Population Growth and Demographic Transition; Patterns of Stall in Fertility Decline and Their Determinants in Eastern Africa; Declining Populations; Population, Poverty, and Economic Development; Sola Schola et Sanitate: Human Capital as the Root Cause and Priority for International Development; Population and Climate Change; General Discussion.
Day 2: Population Policies, Programs and the Environment; Traversing the Mountaintop; World Fossil Fuel production to 2050; Considering Population and War: A Critical and Neglected Aspect of Conflict Studies; Making Family Planning Accessible in Resource-Poor Settings; the Theoretical and Political Framing of the Population Factor in Development; General Discussion.
(February 2009) Population change will be a major force shaping the next half century. Looking ahead is difficult, but we can be certain that the size and structure of human populations will be an important factor driving many of the key global changes likely to take place in the coming decades. Projections of global population by country and region can be made with some assurance as far as 2050, because the parents of many of the children who will be alive then are already growing up. We know that 99 percent of future population growth will be in the developing world, and that 90 percent of that growth will be in the poorest countries and regions. We also know that the populations of Europe, Russia, and Japan will decline by a measurable amount.
The Forum focuses on the impact of population growth and population decline on economic and social development, on resources, and on broad national and international issues such as energy use, environmental degradation and conflict. The goal of the Forum is to develop the best possible population-related policies and programs that will foster the welfare of the human and natural world.
We are exceedingly grateful to the sponsor, the Fred H. Bixby Foundation, who made this gathering possible through its generous support.
Malcolm Potts, MB, BChir, Ph.D., FRCOG
Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability, University of California, Berkeley
Anne M. Pebley, MPA, Ph.D.
Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health, University of California, Los Angeles
J. Joseph Speidel, M.D., MPH
Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, University of California, San Francisco
Participants and Presenters
John Bongaarts is vice president and distinguished scholar of the Population Council, where he has been employed since 1973. Dr. Bongaarts' research has focused on topics such as the determinants of fertility, population–environment relationships, the demographic impact of the AIDS epidemic, and population policy options in the developing world. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He received the Robert J. Lapham Award (1997) and the Mindel Sheps Award (1986) from the Population Association of America, and the Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health (1980). Dr. Bongaarts has a master's degree in systems analysis from the Eindhoven Institute of Technology, Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in physiology and biomedical engineering from the University of Illinois. He has published widely, including articles in Scientific American and Science and he is co-editor of Beyond 6 Billion: Forecasting the World's Population.
William P. Butz is president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Before joining PRB, he was a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, associate director of the U.S. Census Bureau, and division director for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the National Science Foundation. He completed his education at Indiana University and the University of Chicago where he studied economics, statistics, and demography. He has taught economic development at UCLA and UCSB, served on numerous commissions and boards, and written more than 80 research and policy papers on economic demography, nutrition and health, and statistical and science policy. His recent work has focused on the scientific and technical work force in the United States; the technology transfer process linking basic science to industrial production; global adoption patterns of genetically modified crops; and fertility and migration policy options for the European Union. Since 2001, he has been on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science, where his responsibilities include the Policy Forum, the Education Forum, and the social sciences.
Cameron Campbell is a professor of sociology at UCLA. He received his bachelor's degree from Caltech and his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined UCLA in 1996 following postdoctoral studies affiliated with NICHD and the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. His research focuses on the relationships between social organization, family decisionmaking, and demographic behavior. He has published extensively on family and population in 18th and 19th century Northeast China, most notably the book Fate and Fortune in Rural China, co-authored with James Lee. He has recently published papers on ethnic identity and social mobility, and presented work on disability. He is also a participant in the Eurasia Project, an international collaboration that compares relationships between economic conditions, household organization, and demographic behavior in historical European and Asian communities. He is co-author of a volume Life Under Pressure that examines how household responses to economic stress were reflected in mortality patterns. With James Lee, he is currently working on a study of changes in family and kinship in Northeast China from the 17th century to the present.
Martha Campbell is a political scientist and health policy specialist with interests in population, economics, and issues of scale. A lecturer in the School of Public Health, UC Berkeley, Dr. Campbell is also the founder and president of the nonprofit Venture Strategies for Health and Development, which works in family planning and maternal health in developing countries at the request of their governments. In the 1990s, Dr. Campbell directed the population program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She has written extensively on the nature of conflicting perspectives on population growth as they influence international policies; the recent absence of the subject of population growth in media and policy discussions, including an analysis of the sensitivities around the topic; and the wide range of barriers to fertility regulation that limit women's childbearing options in many developing countries. Dr. Campbell also assisted in producing Return of the Population Growth Factor, the 2007 report of the committee meetings in the UK Parliament on the impact of rapid population growth on the Millennium Development Goals. Dr. Campbell's academic degrees are from Wellesley College and the University of Colorado.
David Canning is a professor of economics and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Canning's research focuses on demographic change, economic development, and health. His research focuses on the effect of changes in age structure on aggregate economic activity, and the effect of changes in longevity on economic behavior. In terms of health, his research focuses on health as a form of human capital and its effect on worker productivity. Before assuming his position at Harvard, Dr. Canning held faculty positions at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, Columbia University, and Queen's University in Belfast. Dr. Canning has served as a consultant to the WHO, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. In addition, he was a member of Working Group One of the WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. He is currently deputy director of Harvard's Program on the Global Demography of Aging.
Richard P. Cincotta is currently the consulting demographer to the Long Range Analysis Unit of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). His research focuses on the course of the demographic transition and on trends in human migration, and he has studied their relationships to natural resource dynamics, to human health, and to the political stability and regime status of states. His most recent research findings on the relationship between demography and democracy are outlined in the March/April 2008 edition of Foreign Policy. He also contributed to the NIC's long-range global analysis, Global Trends, 2025: A Transformed World, published in 2009. From 1996 to 2006, Dr. Cincotta was a senior research associate at Population Action International, in addition to serving as a policy fellow in USAID's Office of Population and Reproductive Health from 1992-1996. He has conducted research projects in China, India, and Morocco, and has worked overseas in various positions for another six years, including service in an intelligence branch of the United States Navy from 1969 to 1973 in Europe and Southeast Asia.
Joel E. Cohen is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations and Head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, New York. His research deals with the demography, ecology, epidemiology, and social organization of human and nonhuman populations and with mathematical concepts useful in these fields. In 1997, he won the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for his book, How Many People Can the Earth Support? He also shared the Fred L. Soper Prize from PAHO for his work on Chagas' disease. In 1999, Dr. Cohen was co-winner of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. He earned doctorates in applied mathematics in 1970 and population sciences and tropical public health in 1973 from Harvard. His most recently published book is Educating All Children: A Global Agenda and his forthcoming book is International Perspectives on the Goals of Universal Basic and Secondary Education. Cohen is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Cohen serves on the governing boards of The Nature Conservancy, the Population Reference Bureau, the Black Rock Forest Preserve, and the American Philosophical Society.
Peter J. Donaldson was appointed as the president of the Population Council in January 2005. Donaldson's first postdoctoral employment was as a Council Associate in Thailand (1973–1975) and a representative in South Korea (1975–1977). He then spent eight years at Family Health International. From 1985 to 1989, he was director of the Committee on Population at the National Research Council. In 1989 he returned to the Council as director for South and East Asia, again in Thailand. He was president of the Population Reference Bureau from 1994 to 2003. Donaldson rejoined the Population Council in 2003 as director of the International Programs Division. Dr. Donaldson has served as president of the Association of Population Centers and a director of the Population Association of America. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University. He has written or edited six books and numerous articles on population and Asian affairs.
Jorge Durand is a professor of anthropology at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and co-director, with Douglas S. Massey, of the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Durand was educated at the Universidad Iberoamericana (BA), El Colegio de Michoacán (MA), and the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail, France (Ph.D.). He has studied and written about Mexican migration to the United States for the last 25 years. His publications in this field, as author and co-author, include: Return to Aztlan, Más allá de la línea, Miracles on the Border, Migrations mexicaines aux Etats-Unis, La experiencia migrante, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, and Clandestinos.
Nicholas Eberstadt is a Henry Wendt Scholar in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, where he conducts research on demographics, foreign aid, poverty, infant mortality, health disparities, and economic development. He has written extensively on Korea, East Asia, and countries of the former Soviet Union. His books include The End of North Korea and The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe.
Alex C. Ezeh is the executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). He joined APHRC in 1998 (then a Population Council program in Nairobi) as a senior research fellow. In 2000, he was appointed APHRC's interim director and was charged with the responsibility of leading its transition into an autonomous institution. Having successfully led this transition, he was appointed APHRC's executive director in 2001. Prior to joining APHRC, he worked at ORC/Macro International where he provided technical assistance in several African countries in the design and conduct of Demographic and Health Surveys. Dr. Ezeh has more than 20 years of experience working in public health and has authored numerous scientific publications on population, demographics, health, and health metrics. Currently, he participates on the boards and committees of several international public health organizations, including the WHO, PATH, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, University of Witwatersrand School of Public Health in South Africa, and the Wellcome Trust. Dr. Ezeh received his Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. He earned a master's in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, and a M.Sc. in sociology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1988.
Duff Gillespie is a senior scholar at the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also a visiting professor in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences. Before moving to Johns Hopkins in 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Prior to the Packard Foundation, Duff Gillespie was senior deputy assistant administrator for the Global Health Bureau at USAID. He has worked in the population and health field for 33 years and was the director of USAID's Office of Population for seven years. Dr. Gillespie received the Arthur Flemming Award in 1977 for pioneering operations research on community-based family planning and primary health care delivery systems. He was a recipient of Presidential Rank Awards in 1988, 1990, and 2001. In 2003, the Global Health Council presented Dr. Gillespie with a lifetime recognition award. He received the Administrator's Distinguished Career award from USAID in 2004. Dr. Gillespie obtained his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Hilary Godwin is professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA. Dr. Godwin recently joined the UCLA School of Public Health faculty after serving on Northwestern University's Department of Chemistry faculty, most recently as chair. Dr. Godwin's current research focuses on the chemical and biological mechanisms by which toxic metal ions affect neurological signaling and development. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor and she has been honored by the receipt of the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Toxicology New Investigator Award. Dr. Godwin received her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Stanford. She conducted postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was an NIH postdoctoral fellow.
Allen Greenberg joined the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation as executive director in 1987. In 2004, upon the death of Susie Buffett, he was named president. During his tenure the foundation's grantmaking has grown from about $1 million per year to over $300 million. The foundation's primary focus is family planning and reproductive health, both in the U.S. and internationally. From 1981 to 1985 he was a staff attorney for the Public Citizen Health Research Group. He left the Public Citizen Health Research Group to become legislative counsel to then-Congressman Charles Schumer. There he was responsible for Schumer's work on the Judiciary Committee. Allen has a bachelors degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.
Linna Hao directs the Division of International Collaboration for the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China.
John Harte is a professor of environmental science at UC Berkeley. Following undergraduate studies at Harvard and a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin, he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and an assistant professor of Physics at Yale. His research interests include climate-ecosystem interactions, theoretical ecology, and environmental policy. He is the recipient of a Pew Scholars Prize in Conservation and the Environment, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society, the 2004 UC Berkeley Graduate Mentorship Award, a Miller Professorship, and is a co-recipient of the 2006 George Polk Award in Journalism. He is an elected Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. He has also served on six National Academy of Sciences committees and has authored over 180 scientific publications, including six books. One of those books, Consider a Spherical Cow, is a widely used textbook on environmental modeling.
Daniel Kammen received his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in physics at Cornell and then Harvard. While a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and then back at Harvard, he worked on renewable energy technologies and environmental resource management, as well as risk analysis. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he was an assistant professor of Public and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he helped to develop and then chair the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) Program. At Berkeley he is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL). His work is highly interdisciplinary, including technical, economic, social, policy, and environmental analysis and activism in the area of energy production and use, with field projects focused in Africa. His focus is on renewable energy, energy policy, and development.
Musimbi Kanyoro is the director for the Population and Reproductive Health Program of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She oversees an annual budget of approximately $50 million dedicated to grantmaking in India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines, Pakistan, and the USA, with a focus on services, advocacy, technology, education, and research to enhance women and girls' reproductive health. Dr. Kanyoro has held top management positions in international organizations since 1982, often as the first woman from the South or from Africa. From 1998 to 2007, she was the General Secretary of the World YWCA, with operations in 125 countries and outreach to over 25 million women and girls. Dr. Kanyoro was a nominee for the 1000 Women Peace Prize and holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Nairobi and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Doctor of Ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary. She was also a visiting Scholar at Harvard and has authored or edited 10 books and published over 100 articles.
Ronald Lee holds an master's in demography from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He taught economics at the University of Michigan until 1979 when he received a joint appointment in UC Berkeley's Demography and Economics departments. He currently holds the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Endowed Chair in Economics. He has taught courses in economic demography, population theory, population and economic development, demographic forecasting, aging, indirect estimation, and research design. He served as the president of PAA and has been honored with the Mindel C. Sheps Award for Research in Mathematical Demography and the Irene B. Taeuber Award for outstanding contributions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the British Academy. He chaired the Population and Social Science Study Section for NIH and served on the National Advisory Committee on Aging. Dr Lee is the director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at UC Berkeley. His current research includes including modeling and forecasting demographic time series, the evolutionary theory of life histories, population aging, social security, and intergenerational transfers.
Wolfgang Lutz is leader of the World Population Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and director of the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Professor of Social and Economic Statistics at the Vienna University of Economics. He is also Principal Investigator of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development and a member of the boards of several population organizations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the US. He earned a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, authored and edited 25 scientific books and published more than 180 refereed articles, including 7 contributions in Science and Nature and 19 in Population and Development Review. His most recent books (as co-author/editor) include: The Future Population of the World (1996); Frontiers of Population Forecasting (1998); Population and Climate Change (2001); Population and Environment: Methods of Analysis (2003); The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Development (2004), The New Generations of Europeans: Demography and Families in the Enlarged European Union (2006), and Population Aging, Human Capital Accumulation and Economic Productivity (2008).
Richard Nehring founded and has been president of Nehring Associates in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 1983. Nehring Associates provides the Significant Oil and Gas Fields of the United States Database to government and industry for use in the evaluation of petroleum resources, exploration, development, and supply. From 1973 to 1983, Mr. Nehring led research into fossil fuel resource and supply issues at The Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Mr. Nehring has written extensively on oil and gas resource and supply issues for more than 30 years. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) in 1990 and 1991. He has been a member of AAPG's Committee on Resource Evaluation since 1993. In November 2006 he organized and chaired an international AAPG research conference on Understanding World Oil Resources.
Marc Noor Ahmed Okunnu Sr. is a Nigerian citizen currently serving as the Director of the Centre for African Family Studies in Nairobi. Since 1973, he has worked in institutional capacity building (ICB) and organizational development (OD), focusing on governmental agencies and civil society organizations engaged in health and population development programs, with emphasis on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and HIV/AIDS. Mr Okunnu has served as the CEO of eight different organizations, with expertise in analysis, planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of ICB and OD initiatives within integrated RH/Family Planning and STI/HIV/AIDS education and service delivery programs. He has founded and/or assisted in the establishment of six new organizations; led strategic review and planning processes in over 20 African agencies or organizations; helped organizations improve governance and management systems; and provided leadership and support to organizations in the areas of partnership development and capacity building. With extensive work and life experience in Botswana, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, Mr. Okunnu is focused on development concerns, issues, and aspirations in sub-Saharan Africa, especially those related to organizational development and capacity building for SRH and HIV/AIDS programs.
Brian O'Neill is a Scientist III at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He also leads the Population and Climate Change (PCC) Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. He holds a Ph.D. in earth systems science and an M.S. in applied science, both from New York University. Brian's research interests are in the field of integrated assessment modeling of climate change, which links socioeconomic and natural science elements of the climate change issue in order to address applied, policy questions. His particular areas of focus include the relationship between demographic change and greenhouse gas emissions, the characterization of uncertainty and its role in decision analysis, and scenario analyses linking long-term climate change goals to shorter-term actions. He has worked as a member of the science staff of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, and as an assistant and associate professor (Research) at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. In 2004, he received a European Young Investigator (EURYI) award to support work on demography and climate change. He is the lead author (along with Landis MacKellar and Wolfgang Lutz) of Population and Climate Change, published by Cambridge University Press. He has also served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report in a volume on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (Working Group II), and for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in a volume on Scenarios.
Anne R. Pebley, MPA, Ph.D., is Bixby Professor of Population in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health and holds a joint faculty appointment in the UCLA Department of Sociology. She is director of the UCLA Bixby Center for Population and Reproductive Health, director of UCLA's California Center for Population Research, and chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences. Between 1993 and 1999, she was senior social scientist and director of the Population Research Center at RAND in Santa Monica, CA. Prior to 1993, she was professor of demography and international affairs at Princeton University. She has an MPA and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She has written widely in the areas of social demography, public health demography, and population.
Herbert B. Peterson is currently professor and chair, Department of Maternal and Child Health and Professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Gillings School of Public Health and School of Medicine, respectively. The Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization recently designated the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the UNC as a new collaborating Center with the Department of Reproductive Health and Research at WHO. Dr. Peterson serves as the head of the center. For 20 years he worked at the CDC, where he was chief of the Epidemiologic Studies Branch and the first chief of the Women's Health and Fertility Branch of the Division of Reproductive Health. In 1999, he was assigned by CDC to the WHO in Geneva, where he served until joining UNC in 2004. Dr. Peterson was elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences in 2007, and has received distinguished service awards from the U.S. Public Health Service and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Malcolm Potts, MB, BChir, Ph.D., FRCOG, is a British obstetrician with a Ph.D. in embryology from Cambridge University. He the Bixby Professor at UC Berkeley and director of the Fred H. Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability. Potts has worked internationally since the late 1960s, when he became the first medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. In this capacity he conceptualized the community-based distribution of contraceptives and he introduced manual vacuum aspiration for abortion in Europe and many developing countries. As the president and CEO of Family Health International (1978-1990), Potts initiated the first population-based studies of maternal mortality in poor countries, and he oversaw collaborative research in family planning, contraceptive development, and HIV prevention in 40 countries. Since coming to UC Berkeley in 1992, Potts has continued his work on population and family planning in many countries. He is interested in cost-effectiveness, the private as well as the public sector, and in community involvement to bring family planning and health interventions to a large scale in low-resource settings. He is the principal investigator in a Fogarty-supported program in northern Nigeria. The most recent of his 12 books is Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safe World.
Ndola Prata is a physician and medical demographer from Angola. She is an assistant adjunct professor of maternal and child health in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, and also serves as the scientific director in the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability and as the medical director of Venture Strategies for Health and Development. After practicing medicine in Angola for 10 years and serving as head of the Social Statistics Department at the National Institute of Statistics of Angola, she received an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After moving to the United States, she spent five years as a demographer/analyst for CDC's Division of Reproductive Health. Though Dr. Prata's current research focuses primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, she is also heading research projects in South Asia, and has led operations research in Latin America, Central Asia, and South America in the recent past. Much of her work has been focused on the expansion of use of misoprostol to control postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. In addition, she is currently heading a community-based study in Ethiopia investigating the efficacy and preferred choice of provider for injectable contraceptives. Dr. Prata has published extensively in areas of family planning, financing, and ability to pay for reproductive health programs; the role of the private sector in health care in developing countries; adolescent sexual behavior in developing countries; priorities for maternal health; and the use of misoprostol to manage postpartum bleeding.
Andrew Revkin is a prize-winning journalist and author who has spent 20 years covering subjects ranging from murder in the Amazon to the plight of the working poor to the political clash over global warming. Since 1995, he has been a reporter for The New York Times, mainly covering environmental issues. Before joining the Times Mr. Revkin authored The Burning Season, which won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Book Prize. In 1992, Mr. Revkin authored Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, a companion volume to the first museum exhibition on climate change created by the American Museum of Natural History. He was a senior editor of Discover, a staff writer at the LA Times, and a senior writer at Science Digest, and has written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and other magazines. His opinion pieces have appeared in the LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and the Brazilian paper O Globo. He was awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. Mr. Revkin lectures frequently on writing and on the environment at colleges across the country and has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, and CNN. He holds a biology degree from Brown University and a masters in Journalism from Columbia University.
Susan M. Rich is a senior program officer, Reproductive Health, at the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation.
Jose "Oying" Rimon is a senior program officer at the Global Health Policy and Advocacy group of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Currently, his primary responsibility is developing a portfolio of advocacy grants and partnerships aimed at revitalizing the reproductive health and family planning global agenda. This portfolio will cover grants in the United States, Europe, Japan, Asia, new emerging donors, and 15 developing countries. Jose has 25 years of leadership experience in public health and is a recognized expert in evidence-based advocacy and communication interventions; managing complex, multi-faceted international programs; and in establishing private/public partnerships. His track record includes strategically positioning alliances and coalitions in many countries to influence public agenda. He has advised presidents, ministers, Parliamentarians, leaders of civil society groups, and top government and corporate officials on public health and reproductive health policies in Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Before joining the foundation, he held three concurrent posts at John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was the senior deputy director of the Center for Communication Programs overseeing an annual budget of $75 million and responsible for programs in at least 30 countries. He then served as the director of the Health Communication Partnership, a five-year $200 million global health program, and finally as senior faculty at the Department of Health, Behavior and Society. He has graduate degrees in communication and population studies.
Roger Short obtained a degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Bristol in 1954, and then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned his Ph.D at Cambridge in 1956, after which he became a Fellow at Magdalene College and later a Reader in Reproductive Biology in the School of Veterinary Medicine. During his Cambridge days, he met a fellow Ph.D. student, Malcolm Potts. The intellectual freedom of those heady days enabled him to broaden his horizons, studying the reproduction of wild red deer on the island of Rhum, followed by a year studying elephants in Uganda. In 1972, he became the foundation director of a new Medical Research Council Unit of Reproductive Biology in Edinburgh, where he switched species and focused his interest on human reproduction for 10 years. It was here that the problems of uncontrolled human population growth began to dawn on him. Relocating to Australia, Dr. Short spent 1989 as a consultant to the WHO's Global Program on AIDS. Assuming chairmanship of FHI in the 1980s gave Dr. Short a chance to resume discussions with Malcolm Potts, where a paper table napkin in a local restaurant became the origin of their co-authored book Ever Since Adam and Eve : The Evolution of Human Sexuality. In 1996, Dr. Short joined Melbourne University, where he is actively engaged in teaching and research on elephants, AIDS, and contraception, an illogical combination of enthusiasms that all come together as we begin to consider the plight of our planet today.
Steven W. Sinding served as director of the USAID Office of Population from 1983 to 1986, following field assignments as a population officer in Pakistan and the Philippines. From 1986 to 1990 he was the director of USAID's Mission to Kenya. Following a 20-year career at USAID, Dr. Sinding served for a year as senior population adviser to the World Bank and then moved to the Rockefeller Foundation as director of the Population Sciences program. From 1999 to 2002 he was a clinical professor of Public Health at Columbia University, moving in 2002 to become director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in London. He retired from IPPF in 2006, and is now a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute and an international consultant living in Vermont.
J. Joseph Speidel, M.D., MPH is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Between 1995 and 2003, he directed the population program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He previously served as vice president and president of Population Action International and between 1978 and 1983 directed the USAID Office of Population. Dr. Speidel is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of more than 100 publications on population related topics.
Jeff Spieler is the senior technical adviser in Science and Technology in Population and Reproductive Health (PRH) at USAID in Washington, D.C. Prior to retiring from USAID in October 2008, he was the senior science adviser in PRH from March 2007 through September 2008, and the chief of the Research, Technology and Utilization Division in PRH from January 1993 until March of 2007. He joined USAID in 1983 as the senior Biomedical research adviser in Population after spending 11 years in Geneva as a scientist in the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction of the WHO. Before joining WHO, he worked for six years as a bench scientist at Lederle Laboratories Pharmaceutical Company in Pearl River, New York. Jeff's areas of expertise include contraceptive R&D, contraceptive technology and family planning, and R&D on condoms and microbicides for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other STIs.
Bradley Thayer is a political scientist and an associate professor in Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, in Washington D.C. Dr. Thayer's research integrates international politics; international relations theory; grand strategy; U.S. national security policy—nuclear deterrence, proliferation, and terrorism, specifically; the rise of China; NATO and transatlantic relations; and the origins of war and ethnic conflict and the dynamics of suicide terrorism. Dr. Thayer was a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and has taught at Dartmouth College and at the University of Minnesota. He has been a consultant to the Rand Corporation and is a senior analyst for the National Institute for Public Policy. He has worked for the United States Strategic Command, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Missile Defense Agency. Thayer is the author of Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (2004); co-author of American Empire: A Debate (2007) and America's Achilles’'Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (1998); editor of American National Security Policy: Essays in Honor of William R. Van Cleave (2007) and Debates in International Relations (forthcoming 2009). From 2004 to 2008, he was an associate editor of Politics and the Life Sciences.
Hania Zlotnik was appointed director of the Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Secretariat in 2005 after working in the Population Division for 23 years. She is the 10th person to serve as director of the Population Division and the first woman to do so. Ms. Zlotnik was chief of the Mortality and Migration Section of the Division from 1993 to 1999, and she directed the Population Estimates and Projections Section from 1999 to 2003. She also served as assistant director from 2003 to 2005. Before joining the Population Division, Ms. Zlotnik worked at the Committee on Population and Demography of the U.S. National Research Council. Originally from Mexico, Ms. Zlotnik studied mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds a Ph.D. in statistics and demography from Princeton. Ms. Zlotnik's work has covered the analysis of fertility, mortality, migration, and urbanization. She has one of the UN's best-selling manuals, Indirect Techniques of Demographic Estimation, as well as A Step by Step Guide to the Estimation of Child Mortality. Her work has contributed to provide better estimates of international migration worldwide and to the improvement of statistics on international migration. As director of the Population Division, Ms. Zlotnik was responsible for the substantive preparations of the High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development that the General Assembly conducted in 2006 and she has published over 35 articles in books or refereed journals and has collaborated in editing books or reports on varied subjects. Ms. Zlotnik served on the Board of PAA from 2001 to 2003, and was the vice-president of the International Union for the Study of Population (IUSSP) from 2001 to 2005.
Eliya Zulu is the president of UAPS and the deputy director and director of research at the regional African Population and Health Research Center based in Nairobi, Kenya. Hailing from Malawi, he holds a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's in population and development from Australian National University. Prior to joining APHRC, he worked at the Demographic Unit of University of Malawi as a lecturer in demography. His research centers on linkages between urbanization, poverty and health outcomes, sexual and reproductive health (particularly among adolescents), schooling, and bridging the gap between research, policy and action. He has broad experience in research among the urban poor in sub-Saharan Africa and has published extensively on population and health issues, including sexual networking and maternal health in sub-Saharan Africa. He played an instrumental role in designing, and is currently managing the longitudinal health and demographic surveillance system that APHRC is implementing in two slum settlements in Nairobi City. Eliya has served on many international technical panels for improving data systems in Africa, and has led a number of multipartner and multinational research projects on reproductive health and urban poverty and health outcomes. He also serves on the editorial boards for two leading journals in the population field.