Professor John Wilmoth

Department of Demography

Dr. Wilmoth's research investigates the enormous increase in human longevity that has occurred during the past 250 years. This work has been supported continuously since 1993 by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and focuses specifically on causes of the historical mortality decline, future trends in human mortality and life expectancy at birth, exceptional longevity and possible limits to the human life span, mortality differentials among social groups within populations, variation in mortality over the life course in humans, and familial resemblance in mortality and longevity.

Many of these projects include a significant methodological component, which is addressed in the context of the substantive research. However, some methodological topics have become important research projects of their own, including:

• Methods for forecasting mortality and life expectancy
• Parametric models for describing mortality differentials
• Methods for decomposing historical population trends into distinct components

Dr. Wilmoth's research also includes a special emphasis on developing better sources of information about historical patterns and trends in human mortality and life expectancy. Other topics of Dr. Wilmoth's research (both past and present) include demographic impact of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), history of the debate about world population growth, contribution of immigration to population growth in the United States, methods for characterizing demographic variation as a function of age, period, and cohort, and methods for assessing fertility levels in the presence of changes in the timing of births over the life course.