Kenneth Wachter, Ph.D.

Recruitment and Screening Panel

Kenneth Wachter is Professor of Demography and Statistics and Chair of the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1979. A graduate of Harvard, where he received his BA in History and Literature, he worked in the statistical research division of Bell Laboratories, and then completed a PhD in Statistics at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a thesis on eigenvalue distributions for random matrices. He was a fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1971 to 1974, taught at Harvard from 1974 to 1978, and joined the U.C. Berkeley faculty in 1979 with a joint appointment in the newly founded Department of Demography and the Department of Statistics. His research concentrates on applied multivariate statistics, mathematical demography, demographic microsimulation, and biodemography. Books include Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure (1978), growing out of collaboration with Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel, Height Health, and History (1990), coauthored with Roderick Floud and Annabel Gregory, and four edited volumes including Between Zeus and the Salmon (1997) with Caleb Finch and The Future of Meta-Analysis (1990) with Miron Straf. Professor Wachter served on the Special Advisory Panel to the Secretary of Commerce on 1990 Census Adjustment, as an expert witness in the 1980 and 1990 court cases over adjustment, and as an advisor to the Secretary of Commerce on 2000 Census adjustment. He has recently been serving as a consultant to the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice on statistical issues involving public housing. He has been a member of the National Science Foundation Panel on Measurement Methods and Data Improvement, the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on National Statistics, and the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council. He currently chairs the NRC Committee on Population and the Scientific Advisory Board for Germany's Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He teaches demographic methods, mathematical demography, and statistical inference, and received a Distinguished Teaching Award in Social Sciences in 2002. Professor Wachter is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of the 1988 Sheps Award in Mathematical Demography, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999.