Mortimer Spiegelman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Demographic Studies

Mortimer Spiegelman

(1901–1969) was an actuary, biostatistician, and demographer who made exceptional contributions to public health. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he received a Master’s of Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1923 and a Master’s of Business Administration from Harvard University in1925. He spent 40 years on the staff of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company where he published many articles and volumes that attained national and international recognition. He coauthored with Dublin and Lotka The Money Value of Man and Length of Life, both of which have been standard reference volumes. He published two editions of Introduction to Demography, which has been a standard text in demography. His major contribution in the fields of public health and epidemiology came toward the end of his career when he conceived of, coordinated, edited, and carried to a successful conclusion the publication of a series of monographs sponsored by the APHA and published by the Harvard University Press. Each monograph pertained to a specific set of diseases, and the 1960 Census was used in a standard way as the denominator for rates of disease. In his role as editor of this series, he used his considerable powers of persuasion with the authors of the monographs to ensure comparability among them and to make certain that the work on each was completed. This HCPDS Fellowship was established in 1999 by Julia Spiegelman to recognize her brother’s lifelong interest in the field of demography and population studies.