May 08, 2014 | News

Hal Caswell receives Mindel C. Sheps Award

MPIDR guest researcher Hal Caswell has received the 2014 Mindel C. Sheps Award for his contributions to mathematical demography. The award, one of the most prestigious international awards in demography, is presented biennially by the by the Population Association of America (PAA).

Hal Caswell received the award at the PAA meeting in Boston, on May 2, 2014. The honor is named for Mindel C. Sheps, MD (1913-1973), who became an expert in statistics and who made fundamental contributions to the demographic and biological aspects of fertility through her research on the impact of social factors in public health. It is awarded on the basis of important contributions to knowledge either in the form of a single piece of work or a continuing record of high achievement.

Caswell is a Distinguished Research Scholar at MPIDR. He was cited for his lifetime contributions to mathematical demographic analysis, especially his work on matrix population models, spanning studies of plants, animals, and humans. His results have had a great influence on such diverse areas as life history theory, conservation biology, and the evolution of aging.  He is applying these models to study fundamental theoretical questions about the roles of stochastic variation and individual heterogeneity in population dynamics.

Hal Caswell is Professor of Mathematical Demography and Ecology at the University of Amsterdam, and also a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He also holds an Honorary Professorship of Biodemography at Southern Denmark University.