History

The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies was founded in 1964 by the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) Dean Jack Snyder and Roger Revelle (the first director of the Center) with a mandate to address issues of population control. Since then, this University-wide center has expanded its focus and pursued policy questions involving population, resources, health, and the environment, mainly in the context of developing countries.

Over the years, the Center’s intellectual concerns have evolved, in broad strokes by decades, to address the following themes:

• 1960s: Population Control | Water Resources | Reproductive Biology
• 1970s: Population and Resources | Migration
• 1980s: Health Transitions in Developing Countries
• 1990s: Reproductive Health | Common Security | Global Burden of Disease
• 2000s: Well-Being of the Global Poor | Health in Africa
• 2010s: Social and Environment Determinants of Health | Immigration | Aging Societies | Women and Work
• 2020s: Aging Societies | Youth, Families, and Social Mobility | Work, Policy, and Well-Being

As we move along in this new millennium, the “population question” has continued to evolve, as have the tools for population studies. The Center continues to address this evolution through the substantive intellectual issues that engage our affiliates, and the methodological approaches employed in research. As our history illustrates, population studies is a broad subject whose borders are in soft focus. Only through our multi-disciplinary work will we understand the causal and consequential relationships that critically affect human well-being.