Participants

Warren C. Sanderson

Warren Sanderson holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. He is a professor of economics and a professor of history at Stony Brook University in the US state of New York. He is also an institute scholar in the World Population Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria and a member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, Austria. His research interests lie in the interactions between population and economics. He has published in a variety of journals, including Nature, Science, Population and Development Review, Demography, Population Studies, and Demographic Research. His recent research includes probabilistic population forecasting, innovative approaches to the study of population aging, as well as the effects of education and other demographic changes on economic growth.

Shripad Tuljapurkar

Shripad Tuljapurkar is Professor of Biology and the Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. He established and directs Stanford’s Center for Population Research and directs the demography program at Stanford’s Center for the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He is also a member of the Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley. His research spans evolutionary ecology, aging and the demography of prehistoric and contemporary human societies. He has edited scientific journals and served on national and international study groups, including the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and the Technical Advisory Panel to the US Social Security Administration. In 1996, he received the Mindel Sheps Award from the Population Association of America; and in 1998, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Christine Overall

Christine Overall is a Professor in the Queen’s University Department of Philosophy and holds a University Research Chair. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies. From 1997 to 2005 she served as Associate Dean in the Queen’s Faculty of Arts and Science. In 1996 Dr. Overall was the winner of a provincial award for teaching excellence presented by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1998. From 1993 to 2006 she wrote a weekly column entitled “In Other Words” for the Kingston Whig-Standard. From 2008 to 2011 she also wrote a regular column, “It’s All Academic,” for Canada’s national academic magazine, University Affairs. In 2008 she received the Award in Gender Studies from the Royal Society. Dr. Overall has published over a hundred articles and book chapters in the areas of bioethics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of education. She is also the editor or co-editor of four books and the author of six. Her book, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry, won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s 2005 book prize and the Royal Society of Canada’s Abbyann D. Lynch Medal in Bioethics in 2006. Her latest book is Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate, published by MIT Press in 2012.

Nicholas Eberstadt

Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist and demographer by training, is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research. In the US he has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics, among other capacities. He researches and writes extensively on economic development, global health, demographics, and poverty. A prolific author, he has published hundreds of articles and studies and some 20 books and monographs, ranging from Poverty In China (1979) to, most recently, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic (2012). Mr. Eberstadt earned his AB, MPA and Ph.D at Harvard and his M.Sc. at the London School of Economics. In 2012 he was awarded the Bradley Prize.

William Rees

William Rees is a human ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) in Vancouver, Canada. His research and teaching focus on the biophysical prerequisites for sustainable societies in an era of accelerating global ecological change. Within this ‘envelope’, he has special interests in a) the vulnerability of cities and policy for urban sustainability and b) human cognition and behavioural tendencies that frustrate sustainability planning. Prof Rees is a founding member and past President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative, a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and a long-standing member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group. He is perhaps best known in ecological economics as the originator and co-developer of “ecological footprint analysis.” His book on eco-footprinting, with then PhD student Dr Mathis Wackernagel, has been translated into eight languages including Chinese. He has also authored over 140 peer reviewed papers and book chapters and numerous popular articles on humanity’s (un)sustainability conundrum. The influence of Dr Rees’ work is widely recognized and awarded. He has lectured by invitation in 25 countries around the world; the Vancouver Sun named Prof Rees one of British Columbia’s top public intellectuals in 2000; in 2006 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada; in 2007 he was awarded a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship; in 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from Laval University and won both the Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize (jointly with his former PhD student, Dr Mathis Wackernagel).