Denise Lievesley, Special Advisor, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa

Professor Denise Lievesley, a social statistician by training, will be Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London from 1 October 2008. Currently she is special advisor at the African Centre for Statistics of the UN and is based in Addis Ababa.

Denise was, until July 2007, the founding Chief Executive of the English Information Centre for Health and Social Care. Formerly she was Director of Statistics at UNESCO for seven years where she established its new Institute for Statistics.

Denise began her career as an official statistician specialising in survey sampling and subsequently conducting research on non-response and on panel surveys at SCPR (now the National Centre for Social Research). Later she was the Director of the UK Data Archive as well as Professor of Research Methods in the Mathematics Department at Essex University.

She has an honorary doctorate from City University in London and is a fellow of University College London. She was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1999 to 2001. She is currently President of the International Statistical Institute a position she will hold until August 2009 and the first woman to hold this office. She has been the international representative on the Board of the American Statistical Association for the last three years. Denise chairs the methodology committee of the European Social Survey and remains active in the development of social research methods and in research ethics.

Session Convenor: Bob McCaa, University of Minnesota

Dennis Trewin, Statistical Consultant

Dennis Trewin, Australian Statistician, was head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics from July 2000 until January 2007. Prior to that he was Deputy Australian Statistician and, from 1992 to 1995, Deputy Government Statistician in New Zealand.

He is now working as a statistical consultant and has recently completed an assignment at the United Nations Statistics Division. He holds other senior appointments in Australia such as a Trustee for the Australian Government employee pension fund. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne and Curtin Universities.

Internationally, he has been President of the International Statistical Institute having previously been Vice-President and President of the International Association of Survey Statisticians. He is a past Editor of the International Statistical Review. He was also a past President of the Statistical Society of Australia.

He is Chairman of the Global Executive Board of the World Bank's International Comparison Program.

He was awarded a Centenary Medal for his contribution to statistics in Australia and won the Society category in the Smart Australians Award for his leadership on the development of Measures of Australia's Progress. He also was recognised as an Officer of Australia for his contribution to statistics.

Steven Ruggles, Minnesota Population Center

Steven Ruggles is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History and Director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. He is Principal Investigator of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) projects, and has received the William J. Goode Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association, the Allen Sharlin Award from the Social Science History Association, and the Robert J. Lapham Award from the Population Association of America. His current research interests include family demography, the history of American living arrangements since 1850, international comparative analysis of family patterns, and development of historical population data. Misty Heggeness is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. She is a Research Assistant for the IPUMS-International database, and she is writing a dissertation on marital instability and single motherhood in developing countries.

Albert Esteve Palós, University Autonomous of Barcelona

Albert Esteve (Ph.D.) is a Research Fellow at the Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Minnesota Population Center and Institut National d'Études Démographiques, Paris. He specializes in integrating historical and contemporary census microdata and in international comparisons of assortative mating. He is principal investigator of the Integrated European Census Microdata (IECM) project.

Sabine Springer, CENSUS-Project, French National Institute for Demographic Studies

Sabine Springer is currently a member of the INED researcher team of the CENSUS project. She is also participating in the European project MAGGIE (Mayor ageing and gender issues in Europe) under the responsibility of INED, as she did for its predecessor, FELICIE (Future elderly living conditions in Europe). Before obtaining a PhD degree in demography in France she worked for UN-Habitat (Kenya) on homelessness and household projections, and in Nigeria where she participated in a KAP survey on family planning for UNFPA. Currently she concentrates her research on international data comparability and living conditions of elderly persons.

Session convenor: Emily Grundy, Celsius

Patrick Deboosere, Department of Social Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Patrick Deboosere holds a Masters in Political Sciences and a PhD in Sociology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Since 1991, he has been working as a research associate in Interface Demography, the demographic research unit founded by Prof. R. Lesthaeghe. He has been in charge of the unlocking of administrative data for scientific research in Belgium. He accumulated a great deal of experience in fields ranging from technical and statistical problems to judicial and ethical aspects and was project leader in several interuniversity research projects among others on the future of the Belgian census. His research focused for some years on the evolution of households and household composition in Belgium and he was co-author of several monographs on this topic. In recent years his main research interests moved towards inequality in health, mortality and ageing.

Harriet Young, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Harriet Young is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Population Studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her main research interest is in health and inequality in the UK. Much of her recent research has used the Office of National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS) including analysis of cancer incidence and survival and associations with deprivation, and of unpaid care-giving in England and Wales. She has also carried out research on associations between living arrangements and health and well-being using other datasets including the European Social Survey and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.

Pekka Martikainen, University of Helsinki

Professor Pekka Martikainen received his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1994. He currently works at the Population Research Unit of the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He has written on socio-demographic differences in mortality among women, and on the effects of unemployment and death of spouse on mortality. Current research interests include changes and causes of socio-economic differences in cause-specific mortality and health, and challenges associated with population ageing, such as long-term care and household change. He is also working on regional variations in health and is involved in cross-national comparisons of health inequalities.

Submitted papers

Tony Champion, University of Newcastle

Tony Champion is Emeritus Professor of Population Geography at Newcastle University. He has over 30 years' experience of studying migration and residential mobility, including looking at its determinants and its implications for population profiles and planning policies. Recent and current projects include the commuting behaviour of recent migrants, the role of migration in changing the socio-demographic profile of British cities, patterns of migration and population change in English cities, demographic aspects of the viability and self-containment of geographical economies and the regional and local impacts of central and eastern European labour migration.

David Owen, University of Warwick

David Owen is a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Warwick (Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations and Institute for Employment Research). His research is concerned with geographical patterns of demographic and labour market change, migration and the living conditions of minority ethnic groups. He has extensive experience of research using the UK Census of Population (including the Sample of Anonymised Records) and microdata from other large UK survey data sources (such as the Labour Force Survey).

Raluca Prelipceanu, University of Paris 1

Raluca Prelipceanu received a MA in Development Economics from the University of Paris 1 in 2006 and is currently a second-year PhD student at the Sorbonne Centre of Economics and a Marie Curie research fellow at the Luca d’Agliano Centre as part of the FP6 RTN the “Transnationality of Migrants” under the supervision of Alessandra Venturini. The topic of her PhD thesis is “The Mobility of Romanian Professionals in the EU and its Consequences for Development”. Her work so far includes “Labour Migration and Institutional Quality: the Case of Romania”, “The Mobility of Highly-Skilled Romanians in the EU and its Consequences for the Romanian State” and “A Gendered Approach to Temporary Labour Migration and Cultural Norms. The Case of Migration from Romania”.

Adriana Castaldo, University of Sussex

Adriana Castaldo is a research fellow of the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty (Migration DRC) at the University of Sussex. She is a quantitative researcher specialising in the socio-economic aspects of migration and its impact on poverty and development. Her current project explores and analyses the topic of Child Migration within National level household surveys and Censuses. In the past three years she has conducted research on Albania, studying the causes and consequences of Albanian migration using data from the nationally representative 2002 ALSMS, and has several publications on this theme.

Reza Afkhami, University of Manchester

Reza Afkhami is research associate at CCSR, the University of Manchester. He obtained his PhD from University of Essex on psychology of socio-political beliefs of the Iranians. His research interest is on ethnicity, identity and Muslim Diasporas in the West. He has published on religion, ethnicity and equality and human rights statistics in the UK: an identification of the current evidence gaps.

Yaojun Li, University of Manchester

Yaojun Li is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. His research interests are in social mobility, socio-political capital, and labour market situation of minority ethnic groups. Recent publications have appeared in British Journal of Political Sciences, European Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Work, Employment and Society, Sociological Review, International Journal of Sociology, KZfSS and Sociological Research Online. He also has book chapters and consultation papers for British government organisations. He has conducted research projects funded by the ESRC, EHRC, DTI, NAW and other organisations. He served on the Editorial Board of Sociology and the Advisory Board for the JRF. He is a reviewer for American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Political Studies, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Political Studies, European Society, Sociology, Sociological Review, Sociological Review Online, Health and other journals. He is also a reviewer for British and Irish government research agencies.

Paul Norman, University of Leeds

Paul Norman is a population andhealth geographer particularly focusing on time-series analysis of both area and individual-level data derived from census, survey and administrative records. Paul’s research includes the development of small area population estimation methods that incorporate multiple data sources about population subgroups and demographic processes and the use of area typologies and microdata to understand migration patterns and resulting health outcomes. Paul did his PhD at the School of Geography, University of Leeds, was then a research fellow at CCSR before returning to Leeds as Lecturer in Human Geography.

Kingsley Purdam, University of Manchester

Kingsley Purdam is an expert in public consultation including public policy making and consultation methods. His recent research includes Citizen Engagement Across the EU (ESRC), Campaigning and Engagement at the 2005 General Election (MU) and Measuring the Impact of Citizen Engagement (NEM). He has also completed political research for ITN and IRN (General Elections 1997, 2001 and 2005).

He is one of the co-founders of the Confidentiality and Privacy Research Group (CAPRI) at Manchester University and a member of the Democracy, Citizens and Elections Research Network (DCERN) and the Manchester Social Networks Group. Current projects at CCSR include Data Environment Analysis (ONS), Civic Engagement (ESRC) and Democracy and Council Size (Electoral Commission)

Neeru Gupta, World Health Organization, Switzerland

Neeru Gupta is Demographer-Statistician with the World Health Organization's Department of Human Resources for Health. She has over fifteen years of professional experience in the collection, analysis, dissemination and use of demographic and health data at the national and international levels. She has extensive experience in providing technical assistance to countries and partners in strengthening of health information systems to support decision making for policies and programmes. Dr Gupta has work experience in a number of developed countries and developing countries of the African, Asian, and Latin American and Caribbean regions. She holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada).

Charles Jones, University of Toronto

Charles Jones is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He studied at Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Edinburgh. He has held academic appointments at Edinburgh University, McMaster University and the University of Toronto and visiting positions at MIT, Harvard and the Université de Paris X-Nanterre. He is currently working on comparative analysis of data from Canada's National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth with data from the UK Millennium Cohort Survey. Another major focus is on the use of data from past Censuses (1871 to 2006) from Canada and other countries to test hypotheses related to family, gender and migration, as well as work and occupations.

Hiroshi Kojima, Waseda University

Hiroshi Kojima is Professor of Population, Migration and Family Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. He was Director of International Research and Cooperation, National Institute of Population and Social Security Research before joining Waseda in 2007. He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology/demography at Brown University, USA and was a visiting researcher at INED, Paris. His specialization includes population policy, migration and family demography as well as comparative analysis of microdata. His publications include “Variations in Demographic Characteristics of Foreign ‘Muslim’ Population in Japan: A Preliminary Estimation,” The Japanese Journal of Population (http://www.ipss.go.jp/index-e.htm), Vol.4, No.1 [2006].

Johanna Leinonen, University of Minnesota

Johanna Leinonen holds a Master’s degree in General History from the University of Turku, Finland and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation examines families formed through marriages between Finns and Americans living in either the U.S. or Finland. She is also a Research Assistant for “Gender Ratios and Global Migration”, a collaborative research project between the Minnesota Population Center and the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

Mark Tranmer, University of Manchester

Mark Tranmer is a Senior Lecturer, with a background in social statistics. He studied for his PhD, on ‘Using census data to investigate the multilevel structure of local populations’ in the Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton, before moving to Manchester in 1998. Mark’s main research interests are multilevel modelling, combining data, and social network analysis. Mark has a well-established research link with the University of Wollongong, Australia and visits regularly. Mark runs short courses both locally and internationally on multilevel modelling, as well as courses on combining data and social network analysis. Mark is contact person for the Manchester Social Networks Group.

Mark Elliot, University of Manchester

Mark Elliot has worked at the Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR) since 1996, mainly in the field of statistical confidentiality, founding the international recognised Confidentiality and Privacy Research Group (CAPRI) in 2002, and has managed numerous research projects within CAPRI remit. In 2005 he became Director of CCSR. He is one of the key international researchers in the field of Statistical Disclosure and has an extensive portfolio of research grants and publications in the field.

Dr Elliot has extensive experience in collaboration with non-academic partners, particularly with national statistical agencies (e.g. Office for National Statistics, US Bureau of the Census, Australian Bureau of Statistics) where he has been a key influence on disclosure control methodology used in censuses and surveys and where the SUDA software developed in collaboration with colleagues in Computer Science in Manchester is currently employed.

Aside from Confidentiality, Privacy and Disclosure his research interests include Psychology and Sociology of Personal Relationships and Social Network Analysis.

Zhiqiang Feng, University of St Andrews

Zhiqiang Feng, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews. He also works for the Longitudinal Studies Centre for Scotland (LSCS) and the Centre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research (CIDER). His interests are in geography of population, health inequality, longitudinal analysis, migration, and applications of geographical information systems. He has published in journals such as the British Medical Journal, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Habitat International and Geographic Journal.

Stephen McKay, University of Birmingham

Stephen McKay BA (Oxford) PhD (Bristol) is an economist by background who has developed skills in quantitative social policy analysis, including the collection and analysis of complex data. He is a leading researcher on the links between economic activity, family formation and family finances. He is research advisor to the Families and Children Study (FACS) and the author of a textbook on Lone Parent Families: Gender, class and state. He has been Professor of Social Research at the University of Birmingham since 2007, where he heads the social policy teaching group.

Dudley L. Poston, Texas A&M University

Dudley L. Poston, Jr. is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Asian Studies Program, and the Abell Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts, at Texas A&M University. He holds Adjunct Professorships at Renmin (People’s) University, Beijing; Fuzhou University, China; and Nanjing Normal University, China. He holds a BA degree in sociology from the University of San Francisco (1963), an MA degree in sociology from San Francisco State University (1967), and a Ph.D. degree in sociology from the University of Oregon (1968). Poston joined Texas A&M University in 1992. He previously served on the rural sociology and sociology faculties, respectively, of Cornell University (1988-1992) and The University of Texas at Austin (1970-1988). He has co-authored/edited, or has forthcoming, sixteen books, and over 275 journal articles and book chapters on various sociological and demographic topics.

Pedro Luis do Nascimento Silva, University of Southampton

Pedro Silva, born in 1959, is Principal Research Fellow in Sampling Methodology at the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute of the University of Southampton. His main research interests are survey and sampling methodology applied to household and business surveys, as well as the analysis of survey data. He is a member of the International Statistical Institute, is President of the International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS), presided IASI (the Inter-American Statistical Institute) during the period 2004-2005 and is a member of the Brazilian Statistical Association and of the Royal Statistical Society.

Carlos de la Espriella, Lund University

Carlos de la Espriella is a Colombian architect with a MA on Regional Planning and a MSc on Urban Housing Management. He is currently finishing a PhD research on the capacities of local authorities to assess the impact on poverty reduction of land-based actions. Among others, he has worked as a UNDP consultant on urban planning and low-income housing to the Colombian Ministry of Economic Development; as the planner architect of Los Andes University; and as project manager of social housing projects. His main research interests focus on promoting evidence-based decision-making at local levels aiming at pursuing growth with equity.

Session convenor: Ed Fieldhouse, University of Manchester

Gustave Goldmann, Statistics Canada

Mr. Goldmann is the Manager of the Research Data Centre Program at Statistics Canada. The RDCP supports the activities of the Research Data Centre Network, a pan-Canadian network of 25 social science research laboratories. There are over 1500 researchers working on more than 1000 active projects in the RDCs.

In addition to his responsibilities at Statistics Canada, Mr. Goldmann holds two academic appointments: Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Policy at Carleton University. He currently serves as the President of the Canadian Population Society, the national association of demographers in Canada. His research activities (and interests) include questions related to aboriginal demography, the settlement and absorption of immigrants and issues related to ethnic groups and ethnicity. He has published extensively on these topics in Canadian and international journals.

Jenny Telford , Australian Bureau of Statistics

Jenny Telford is the Director of Census Products and Services at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Jenny has worked in the Australian government sector for over ten years in roles focused on the delivery of data and information through the internet and other channels. The ABS is one of the largest information providers in Australia and freely provides data through the website on a range of social, economic and environmental issues.

Heike Wirth, ZUMA, Germany

Heike Wirth is senior researcher at the German Social Science Infrastructure Services - Centre for Survey Research and Methodology (GESIS-ZUMA), Mannheim, Germany. Over the last decade she has been a member of several German scientific advisory boards for the implementation and application of anonymity measures to official microdata. Since 2007 she has been a member of the scientific advisory board for the German Census 2011 (Zensuskommission 2011).

Session convenor: Jo Wathan, University of Manchester

Ivan Thaulow, Danmarks Statistik

Ivan Thaulow has a M.A. (Political Science) from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was a social researcher at the National Danish Institute of Social Research from 1985 to 2000. He was head of the Labour Market Research Unit from 2000 to 2001, and head of the Family Research Unit from 2001 to 2002. Finally, he was head of the research department on children, ethnic minorities and equal opportunities at the National Danish Institute of Social Research from 2002 to 2008. Since April 2008 he has been Head of Division, Research Services, Statistic Denmark 2008.

Jean-Francois Royer, Insee, France

Jean-Francois Royer was born in 1946 and began his career in the French national statistical institute INSEE in 1970. He has mainly worked in the fields of regional statistics and studies, and data dissemination.

His roles up to 2005 were head of the regional directorate of INSEE in Burgundy (1988-1995) and head of the department of regional action in INSEE-Paris, which is in charge of the production of regional and local data, and foresees the regional studies performed in the 24 regional directorates of INSEE (1995-2005). During the second period, he was also in charge of coordinating the dissemination of the 1999 census. Since 2005, he has been a researcher at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) at INSEE. His research subject is internal migration, and its economic returns. He mainly works with microdata from an administrative panel, the Annual Declaration of Social Data (DADS).

Sri Kanagarajah, Census Operations Division, Statistics Canada

Sri Kanagarajah finished his B.A. in Economics at University of Waterloo in 1991 and started his career at Statistics Canada working on the 1991 Census. He worked for Advisory Services Division in the Toronto Regional Office for 9 years and then moved to head office and spent the last 8 years in Ottawa.

Sri is currently the Chief of Census Client Services Section in Census Operations Division. His roles include managing a group responsible for providing customized Census data solutions for clients, providing help with Census concepts and terminology, producing place of work data, and creating the Census Public Use Microdata Files and Research Data Center Census File.

He has authored several publications and articles. The latest was on employment, titled “Business Dynamics in Canada”, and due to popularity of the publication he re-wrote it with more recent data.

From 2003 to 2005, Sri managed the production of Longitudinal Employment Databases in the Business and Labour Market Analysis Division for over 3 years. He managed the production of a few longitudinal databases including the Longitudinal Employment Analysis Program and Longitudinal Worker File (LWF) which contained data job and firm creation, job and firm losses, employee quits, separations, lay-offs etc.

From 2000 to 2003, he managed a new Survey of Suppliers of Business Financing. He managed this survey from start to finish, including design, development, implementation and analysis. This was a survey of companies that provided financing such as debt, equity and lease financing to small and medium sized firms.

Prior to that he worked in the Toronto Regional Office in the Advisory Services Division as a consultant and worked with key Statistics Canada data users from banks, insurance, telecom and government. Here he won a marketing award in 1994 from the Chief Statistician of Canada.