- Entry type: Person
- Entry ID: AWE6143
Booth, Heather
(1950 – )- Born 1950
- Occupation Academic, Demographer
Summary
Professor Heather Booth is the country’s first female professor of demography. Her research specialties include human mortality modelling and forecasting how long people will live, as well as population ageing, and the socio-demography of longevity.
Details
Heather Booth studied demography and social statistics at the London School of Economics, before pursuing a Masters at Southampton. She then spent three years working at the University of North Carolina. Heather received her doctorate from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and in the 1980s moved to the South Pacific to analyse Vanuatu’s Census. This led to a position with the South Pacific Commission (now known as the Pacific Community), in New Caledonia, where she stayed for five years, later becoming a consultant with the UN and other agencies.
Heather came to Australia in the 1990s and was offered a casual position with the Australian National University. This quickly led to a permanent position.
Professor Booth is currently the Director of Research in the School of Demography at the Australian National University College of Arts and Social Sciences, as well as the leader of the Group on Longevity, Ageing and Mortality (GLAM).
Heather is also an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. She was also the Founding Editor of the Journal of Population Research (JPR) from 2000 to 2006.