Group puts UVic "on the map" in population research field

by Marni Friesen

Governments can't make decisions on important issues such as distributing health care dollars, setting immigration quotas or counteracting the spread of diseases such as HIV without accurate demographic information about the populations they're trying to serve.

Yet population and demo-graphic research has traditionally been an under-recognized field in Canadian universities, according to UVic demographer and economist Dr. Carl Mosk.

As the director of a new, interdisciplinary population research group on campus, Mosk and 10 other UVic scholars are committed to raising the profile of this vital field of study. "Population studies refers to anything dealing with population size, density, age, health, and the dynamics of population growth," says Mosk. "By nature, it tends to reach across disciplinary boundaries."

UVic has always had top-notch population researchers distributed across many faculties, from sociology and anthropology to economics, history and math-ematics and statistics.

Some of the group's members have already been collaborating for years, such as Dr. Eric Roth (anthropology) and Dr. Pauline van den Driessche (math and statistics). They're working on population modeling of the spread of sexually transmitted infections in eastern Africa.

The formation of the population research group in early January has created a hub that will help UVic's population scholars share expertise amongst themselves, says Mosk. Equally important, he hopes it will be a venue to share knowledge with undergraduate and graduate students, and with the wider academic community.

"We would like the national and international community of demographers to know that UVic is "on the map" in the population field - that it's a force promoting population-related research in Western Canada," says Mosk.

"We want to encourage the local community, scholars and policy-makers to take advantage of the expertise we can offer."

To learn more about the population research group and its members, visit www.prg.uvic.ca.