California Center for Population Research
The California Center for Population Research (CCPR) was established in 1998 and has since, been a leading research center for research and training in demography. CCPR is comprised of over 90 active faculty researchers from an array of academic disciplines, such as epidemiology, public policy, economics, sociology, and public welfare. CCPR researchers span several schools, including the College of Letters and Sciences, the Division of Social Sciences, the School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, and the School of Public Affairs, as well as academic departments within UCLA.
The Center receives financial support from the UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost and the College of Letters and Sciences, from an NICHD Infrastructure Support grant, and from faculty research grants from a variety of public and private sponsors, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Research at CCPR includes large-scale projects such as the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS), the Latin American Mortality Database (LAMBDA), the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), the Union Army Veterans Data, and the China Multigenerational Panel Dataset – Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) and Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC). These projects enable affiliates to conduct innovative research on individuals’ health and population dynamics. Examples of other recent projects are studies of neighborhood effects on health, residential segregation, the effects of job loss on health, the health and health-related behaviors of immigrants, social disparities in contraceptive use, how parents and children help each other throughout life with financial assistance and everyday household tasks, social networks and the diffusion of knowledge, and methods for causal inference.
Professor of Sociology and Associate Director Jennie Brand gives a brief overview of training opportunities in demography at the CCPR during the PIPS Graduate Programs in the Population Sciences webinar in November, 2017.
The Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health was established in 2001 at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health as the result of a generous gift from the Fred H. Bixby Foundation. The Center has grown since then with the support of several additional Bixby Foundation gifts. The Center promotes and supports students and faculty engaged in research and internships in the areas of population, reproductive health, and family planning. The principal focus of the program is on reproductive health issues in developing countries, where population growth rates remain high and reproductive health services are poor or inaccessible. However, the Bixby Center also works on reproductive health-related issues in the United States. The Center is led by Dr. Anne Pebley.
Pathways into Program
In collaboration with CCPR, two UCLA departments – Sociology and Community Health Sciences (CHS) — offer doctoral (PhD and DrPH) students the opportunity to specialize in demography. Doctoral students in Economics and several other departments can also specialize in demography by special arrangement and the Economics Department will soon have its own program for students specializing in demography.
Students specializing in demography complete the normal course requirements in their home department, take specialized courses in demographic methods, theory and research, become part of the CCPR community, and have multiple opportunities to work with CCPR faculty on major research projects. Fellowship support is also available for well qualified doctoral students specializing in demography. The doctoral programs with specialization in demography in Community Health Sciences and Sociology are described below.
Students planning on specialized training in demography generally apply to CHS if their interests are more centrally in the area of public health and to Sociology if their interests are more centrally in social science. Demography students in each department complete departmental requirements for the doctoral degree which are described for CHS on http://www.ph.ucla.edu/chs/degree_programs_offered.htm and for the Sociology Department on http://www.sociology.ucla.edu/content/program . Demography students in both departments also complete the following.