Professor David Coleman
Emeritus Professor of Demography, Department of Social Policy and Intervention
About
David Coleman is an Associate Member at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and is Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University following retirement as Professor of Demography in 2013.
Before coming to Oxford in 1980 he was Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at University College London. He served as the Special Adviser to the Home Secretary and later to the Ministers for Housing and Environment in the UK Government from 1985-1987. Research interests include demographic trends in the developed world and their causes and consequences, the future of reproduction, population ageing, immigration and the demography of ethnic minorities.
He has written or edited nine books and over 150 academic papers. He has been joint editor of the European Journal of Population and served on the editorial board of various demographic journals. He is a member of various demographic societies and is on the Council of the migration analysis group ‘MigrationWatch’ and the Advisory Group of the European Jewish Demography Unit.
With others, he organised a symposium at St John’s College (2013) on ‘Population: The Long View’ published as a special issue of the journal Population Studies and more recently organised (October 2019) ‘New Light on Old Britons’; a symposium on the palaeontology and genetic history of early human populations held at the Royal Society.
He is currently engaged in a book to be published by Polity Press An Unintended Transformation: the consequences of international migration on the population of the United Kingdom. A paper entitled Korea on the edge: population failure in a rich economy is in press (2026) for the journal Japanese Political Economy.
Awards include the Valentinevskiye Chteniya Gold Medal of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (2010) and the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Prize for Communication in Demography, Population Council, New York (2016).
Expertise
- Population
- Demographic trends in industrial society
- Demography of immigration and ethnic minorities
- Immigration and integration policies
Selected publications
Media experience
Professor Coleman has considerable experience of working with the media.