The UK Minister of State for Universities and Science appointed the experts from Population Europe Professor Jane Falkingham (University of Southampton) and Professor Melinda Mills (University of Oxford) as Council members for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Jane Falkingham OBE is Professor of Demography and International Social Policy and Dean of the Faculty of Social, Human and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton. She is also the Director of the ESRC Centre for Population Change. Over the past 25 years, Jane has pursued a multidisciplinary research agenda, located at the interface between social policy and population studies and spanning both developed and developing countries. She is currently actively engaged on research projects in the Nairobi slums, rural South Africa, urban China as well as within Europe and the UK. Jane is also the President of the British Society for Population Studies and Vice-President (President elect) of the European Association for Population Studies. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts.
Melinda Mills is the Nuffield Professor of Sociology at Nuffield College and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in the area of sociogenomics (combining social science and molecular genetics), life course research (fertility, partnerships, assortative mating) and has published in the areas of labour market, cross-national research and statistics. Melinda is an elected member of the European Academy of Sociology and has held faculty positions in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Groningen) and Germany (Bielefeld). Melinda is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Sociological Review and publishes in both social and natural science journals.
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