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| Name |
Wachter, Kenneth W. |
| Location
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University of California, Berkeley |
| Primary Field
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Social and Political Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Applied Mathematical Sciences |
 Election Citation
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One of the leading mathematical and statistical demographers of his generation, Wachter has made fundamental contributions to the modeling of population processes, especially microsimulation in historical and contemporary demography and the dynamics of unstable and nonlinear population processes. His work has led to parallel efforts in Britain and elsewhere. |
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Research Interests
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Ken Wachter's current research is devoted to genetic evolutionary demography, to empirical studies of extreme longevity in human populations, and to mathematical demography with applications to COVID vaccination strategies. With David Steinsaltz at Oxford and Steve Evans at Berkeley, he helped develop mathematical models for the evolutionary process of mutation accumulation including explicit age-specific demographic structure. These models aim to account for underlying similarities across species in the shapes of demographic schedules. As richer genomic data become available, work is going on to calibrate the models against empirical estimates and eventually to marshal them for characterizing long-term evolutionary impacts on individual and aggregate patterns of survival. |
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