Project Summary This project seeks to continue providing high quality, interdisciplinary training in demography, with a focus on the relationships between population dynamics, socio-cultural systems, and human health and welfare. Our objective is to continue with our successful recruiting, training, and placement of high quality and diverse trainees across a range of disciplines. Demographic analysis offers a distinct and critical perspective on the health and development of children, as many of the most important issues influencing child and family well-being in the contemporary world are demographic in nature, including declining and postponed fertility, declining and postponed marriage, and the divergence of child welfare by social class. Berkeley is widely recognized as one of the leading centers of demographic training and research in the US and the world. Berkeley has long occupied a unique niche in the population studies training ecosystem, with a strong focus on the analysis of population systems and how they relate to cultural, economic, and political systems. Our graduates hold academic positions at leading universities and demographic research centers in the departments of sociology, economics, anthropology, demography, history, public health and statistics, with recent trainees accepting tenure-track positions at Princeton, NYU, Michigan, Stanford, and others. This training grant complements our other NIA- and NIH-funded initiatives, including the P30 Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, the R24/P2C Berkeley Population Center, the R25 Summer Workshop in Formal Demography, the NIA T32 Training in the Demography of Aging, the NIA-funded undergraduate diversity program R25 Cal ADAR: Advancing Diversity in Aging Research; and the newly funding NICHD T32 Training in Data Science. Berkeley demography has deep tradition of formal demography, increasingly complemented by computational demography, as well as its cultural, critical, and theoretical approaches. The program is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing students and trainees from demography, sociology, public health, and economics. Our trainees will continue to (1) learn core demographic methods and theory, with a focus on formal aggregate and computational approaches; (2) learn to think in critical and theoretically rich ways about population processes and dynamics; (3) apply their knowledge of population processes and dynamics to substantive areas, including family, migration, and health; and (4) take a broad array of supplemental courses. Some trainees received their PhD in Demography or in Sociology and Demography, and others do so in different disciplines, learning demography supplemental to their other discipline. Time from entry to PhD is typically 5 to 6 years. Trainees typically receive T32 support for up to four years for the Demography PhD, and up to two years for trainees from other departments, and most are recruited for the T32 in their first or second years. Support is requested for six predoctoral trainees, consistent with the past.

PROJECT NARRATIVE The proposed program will train new cohorts of demographers to study contemporary issues in population health and wellbeing. Demography is the study of population size, structure, and change. Most contemporary social problems have demographic components, as for example differential fertility rates, rising mortality rates, or changes in migration. By understanding dynamics of mortality, fertility, migration, marriage and divorce, we are better able to develop social policy that promotes child health and family wellbeing.