Biography of John Bongaarts
- Christen Brownlee, Science Writer
John Bongaarts, demographer and vice president of the Policy Research Division at the Population Council, an organization based in New York, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. Throughout his career, he has examined the multitude of factors that affect fertility, mortality, and other human life statistics.
Bongaarts' statistical analyses have helped scientists and policymakers come to a better understanding of the relationships between population and the environment, including the effects of population growth on global warming (1) and global food production (2, 3). His studies on AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s tracked the spread of the epidemic and its effects on worldwide mortality (4, 5). His research on fertility issues, a prevailing interest throughout his 30-year career, has helped developing countries construct population policy options (6, 7). Bongaarts' Inaugural Article, titled ”Estimating mean lifetime,” is featured in this issue of PNAS (8).
An Unorthodox Route
In undergraduate work at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, Bongaarts studied systems engineering, a form of electrical engineering that examines how electrical feedback systems interact and operate. However, when he entered a master's program at Eindhoven, Bongaarts chose to apply his interest to living systems.
”I got a little bored with plain engineering, and I wanted to apply this to what I thought were more interesting things in biology and medicine,” he said. Consequently, …
