PRI Mission

The Population Research Institute (PRI) encourages, organizes, and supports innovative research and training in the population sciences. Drawing on the talents of over sixty outstanding scholars, PRI provides a supportive and collegial intellectual environment to stimulate collaborative, externally funded research. PRI is multidisciplinary in orientation and organization with elected faculty associates hailing from 18 departments and programs in seven colleges. PRI faculty associates are internationally recognized for their research on topics such as the transformation of the American family, health disparities, trends in socioeconomic inequality, and the social and economic consequences of immigration. PRI fosters interdisciplinary research on topics such as these, blending biomedical and developmental perspectives with traditional approaches in the population sciences. The Population Research Institute is an NICHD supported population center.

Infrastructural resources from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Penn State University have been the catalyst for PRI's development as a synergistic center for innovative population research. PRI offers colloquia, workshops, lecture series and conferences to foster professional development and intellectual exchange among PRI researchers. Grants administration services are provided for developing and managing large-scale externally funded population research. PRI also leverages resources by providing common services through research cores including Information, Computing, Programming and Statistics, and Geographic Information Analysis.

PRI is the home of Penn State's Graduate Program in Demography. Graduates of this interdisciplinary training program receive dual Ph.D. degrees combining demography with sociology, economics, anthropology, human development and family studies, rural sociology, agricultural, environmental and regional economics, and health policy and administration. The program draws on 40 faculty from the 7 participating departments. The training philosophy is that research and policy questions in demography are best pursued through the integration of demographic knowledge and methods with paradigms in sociology, developmental psychology, economics, and anthropology. PRI is also the home of a postdoctoral training program in family demography and individual development.

For more information, please send email to: info@pop.psu.edu

If you are interested in becoming a PRI Associate or Affiliate, please see our page on this topic.

Last modified: 04/15/08 | Contact Webmaster