5 Years of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science
October 2024 marked the fifth anniversary of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS). In celebration, members of the centre, and their collaborators and colleagues from around the world, gathered at Rhodes House on Thursday 17 October for the inaugural Demographic Science Summit. A video capturing the celebrations has been released on the Centre's website (below).
Opening the event, LCDS Director and Nuffield Fellow Melinda Mills was joined by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Irene Tracy, the Director of the Leverhulme Trust, Anna Vignoles, and Nuffield College’s new Warden, Julia Black.
Keynote speaker Bill Morneau (former Finance Minister of Canada 2015-20 and former CEO of Morneau Shepell) spoke about ‘Demography in the Real World’. Making a real-world impact has been at the core of the centre’s goals since its inception, a reflection of Nuffield College’s foundational aim to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas between academia and the public world.
Over the last five years, the Centre’s team have published 350 publications and doubled their initial £13 million funding from the Leverhulme Trust and Nuffield College. Reflecting on the lessons she has learned since launching the Centre, Melinda said:
“Without the support of Oxford, Nuffield College and Oxford Population Health, we wouldn’t exist. We cherish the deep disciplinary expertise gained from Departments, which provides the groundwork for advanced interdisciplinary collaboration to unlock new discoveries.”
As Melinda commented, “people are the absolute core” of what they do, allowing them to “disrupt and realign demography to tackle the most challenging problems of our time”. They now have 49 core and 60 affiliated staff members, 20 students, and more than 20 alumni, who work on a wide range of projects ranging from population composition to life expectancy, fertility to the impact of climate change.
Melinda’s reflections on the first five years of the Centre, can be found in her LinkedIn blog entry, ‘What I learned from building an interdisciplinary demographic science centre’.
Photographs by Oxford Atelier. Above right: Nuffield Warden Julia Black addresses the summit, with University Chancellor Irene Tracy (left) and LCDS Director Melinda Mills (right) sitting in the front row of the audience. Above left: Attendees at the Summit.
Video: Celebrating five years of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science