Center for Demography and Ecology

Overall Component Project Summary/Abstract This application requests five years of support for the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. CDE is a highly-productive population research center, with 70 affiliates in 21 departments across four colleges conducting work that directly addresses the three components of the Population Dynamics Branch scientific mission. CDE has held NICHD center grant funding continuously since 1972, and this application requests continuation of that support under NICHD's Population Dynamics Research Infrastructure Program (P2C). Support is requested for an Administrative Core, a Development Core, and a Scientific and Technical Core. The center grant would support an integrated and interdisciplinary collection of scholars whose research spans the field of population science. During the past five years, CDE has recruited a large number of excellent young scientists and established scholars and strengthened its ties across campus with departments, research centers and institutes in fields related to CDE's research areas. Our research portfolio is now more diverse, more interdisciplinary in character, and covers a greater portion of the life course than in the past. CDE affiliates conduct research in five primary research areas: (1) Fertility, Families and Households; (2) the Demography of Inequality; (3) Health and the Life Course; (4) Biodemography; and (5) Spatial and Environmental Demography. In addition to innovative research in each of these areas, CDE researchers continue to collect and produce high-quality data for use by the population research community, including a growing body of genetic and biomarker data. Continued infrastructure support from NICHD will allow CDE to leverage substantial commitments from the University, a large portfolio of individual research grants, and outstanding human and organizational resources to promote innovative interdisciplinary research in population science.