Join us for conversations that inspire, recognize, and encourage innovation and best practices in the education profession.
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The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science
Human Population Dynamics Scientists
Content Developer
- David E. Bloom
- David Bloom is Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography and chairman of the Department of Population and International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. His recent work has focused on the links among population health, demographic change, and economic growth, and on primary, secondary, and higher education in developing countries. He has been on the faculty of the public policy school at Carnegie Mellon University and the economics departments of Harvard University and Columbia University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he co-directs the Academy’s project on Universal Basic and Secondary Education.
Featured Scientists
- Deborah L. Balk
- Deborah Balk is associate professor at the Baruch School of Public Affairs and acting associate director of the Institute for Demographic Research at the City University of New York. Until Fall 2006, she was research scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information of Network at Columbia University. There she was also lead project scientist for the NASA-funded Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center where she worked on large-scale data integration, and analysis, of geographic, survey, and administrative data. Among her current projects, she is principal investigator on two studies of urbanization and a National Science Foundation-funded project on emerging infectious disease. She is currently a member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population working group on Urbanization and two National Research Council panels (on Populations at Risk, and Confidentiality of Data). She received a Ph.D. in demography from the University of California at Berkeley, and Masters and Bachelors degrees from the University of Michigan. // Read interview transcript
- Martha Farnsworth Riche
- The Honorable Martha Farnsworth Riche served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau between 1994 and 1998. Through Farnsworth Riche Associates, Dr. Riche consults, writes, and lectures on demographic changes and their effects on policies, programs, and products. She began her career as an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, then moved to the private sector where she was a founding editor of American Demographics, the nation’s first magazine devoted to interpreting demographic and economic information for corporate and public executives. There she identified and assessed important socio-economic trends, such as the lengthening of dependency among youth (“The Boomerang Age”), and the shift from a youth-dominated population to one where each generation is represented equally (“From Pyramids to Pillars”). In 1991, she became director of policy studies for the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the demographic component of policy issues. A fellow of the American Statistical Association, she is the author of numerous articles, papers, and publications in academic and business journals, and a frequent speaker before university, business, and policy audiences. // Read interview transcript
