London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

What is demography?

Demography is a discipline that studies population dynamics or population change. Demographers study how populations reproduce themselves, how they die, and how they migrate.

What first inspired you to pursue demography as your field?

I first became aware of demography when I was working at the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) back in Mexico, where we were conducting a census. The Census is one of the main sources of information for demographers and in those years, Mexico was going through an upsurge of violence due to the 'war on drugs'. I was very interested in how could we use demographic methods to quantify the consequences of this increased violence, for example.

Is demography mainly an academic discipline, or does it have wider applications beyond academia?

Demography has applications everywhere. Everything is a population and you can think of a population of humans, but you can think of a population of plants, of insects, of systems. Everything that you learn in your demographic training can be applied to any discipline, but also any type of job.

Institutions such as United Nations and WHO need demographers to develop their policy-oriented activities, but also just in general to know about populations.

What are some of the most pressing demographic issues facing the world today?

Today, one of the most concerning issues is definitely the ongoing conflict in many parts of the world. This has repercussions for fertility dynamics, for population health, and it is definitely having repercussions for migration. These populations are changing continuously.

How should we think about population decline, growth and migration?

Every population changes continuously. Every country is always in a continuous state of change, and populations are constantly reshaping themselves in different ways. Even within countries, we have different types of populations. We often use states or geographic boundaries to define populations, but within these boundaries there are also different ethnicities, races and other groups, so populations are always changing.

I don't think the question of whether we have too many people in some places, or too few people in others, is really what we should be targeting. Instead, we should be asking: what are the causes and potential consequences of these changes?

The question of whether a population is too big or too small is often the kind of topic that newspapers want to publish. But as a demographer, I don’t think that is the most pertinent question.

The more important question is how we educate the next cohort of demographers to understand the causes and consequences of population change, rather than simply trying to answer questions about population booms or population size.

What are the advantages of studying demography at LSHTM, and what should students be prepared for?

An advantage of working/studying at the school is definitely that you will meet people from everywhere. LSHTM has a long tradition in demography, we established one of the first demography programmes in Europe! The impact of the school expands all over the world, when I was doing my master's back in Mexico, I knew all about LSHTM.

What advice would you give to prospective MSc Demography & Health students?

We love having demography in the school and we love teaching. We're very passionate about it, all the research that we do spans every topic from fertility, migration and mortality. LSHTM is equipped to provide the best environment to study demography.

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