Dr. George W. Leeson

Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford, Fellow of the Galton Institute

RESEARCH

Dr. George W. Leeson is Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford. Dr. Leeson’s first degree was in Mathematics, followed by a Masters in Applied Statistics, both from Oxford. His Doctoral work was in Demography, firstly at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (working with Professor Bill Brass), and then at the University of Copenhagen (working with Professor Jan M. Hoem and Professor P.C.Matthiessen). He then worked as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Statistics, University of Copenhagen, before returning to Oxford to take up a Senior Research Fellowship in Demography.

Dr. Leeson’s main research interests are in the socio-demographic aspects of ageing populations, covering both demographic modelling of population development and the analysis of national and international data sets.

Dr. Leeson has directed the Danish Longitudinal Future Study, which elucidates the attitudes and aspirations of future generations of older people in Denmark, and he is Principal Investigator with Professor Sarah Harper on the Global Ageing Study, a survey of 44,000 men and women aged 40 to 80 in 24 countries.

Dr. Leeson’s current research includes the demographic inequalities of global ageing, the changing populations of Europe, migration and migrants in Europe, health and social eldercare migrant workers, migration and fertility in Central and Eastern Europe, and the demographics of increasing longevity.

Dr. Leeson is a leading member of The Complex Environmental Population Interactions Project which unites key demographers, economists, anthropologists, philosophers and environmentalists to address through research, modeling and scenarios, the range of complex interactions between environmental and demographic change over the first half of the 21st century.