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The great baby bust, ageing communities, migration and climate change – the headlines are dominated by pressing issues facing populations globally. These population trends impact everything from voting behaviour to carbon emissions, labour markets to sexual health, and from family and relationships to economic growth and equality.

Join our MSc Demography and Health to study population dynamics and their interaction with global health. Over one year (full time) or two years (part time or split study), you’ll learn to analyse processes that govern population change, including reproductive behaviour, exposure to health risks, economic growth, and climate change.

Our degree is recognised by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for students planning PhD research, and the Population Investigation Committee (PIC). Scholarships from these bodies and others are available each year.

What you will learn

Learn demographic methods and theory, including population projections; dynamics of fertility, mortality and migration; data science and analytics; life-course research and survival analysis

Learn to present results of analyses through written and oral presentations

Take a critical, interdisciplinary approach to the study of population change and its interactions with wider social, political and environmental change

Discover how we can use evidence-based approaches to develop and evaluate population programmes

Formulate critical, policy-relevant, research questions and use demographic and health data to address them

Develop practical skills through student-led seminars, data analysis tasks and mini-research projects

Understand how to analyse and exploit rich new data sources to unravel contemporary population dynamics and their interactions with social, economic and environmental change. You will also learn how to conduct demographic research in situations where data are lacking. Our Population Studies Group has a rich history of pioneering demographic methods where data are scarce or unreliable in a wide variety of settings.

You’ll be taught by demographers, social scientists, and reproductive health specialists and you will be welcomed into a dynamic research group who are committed to demography training. Hear about their specialist research on everything from improving mortality data collection in pandemics, to evolutionary and anthropological demography, to the relationship between violence and fertility, as well as from a range of external speakers working in the population field.

With a wide choice of modules, you’ll be able to shape your study to suit your interests. Perhaps you’ll find a passion for population projections under different scenarios. Or maybe you’ll be interested in critically appraising population policies or studying how population interacts with climate change. Your research project will give you a chance to examine an area in more depth. Past students have explored topics such as the demographic impact of climate change in the Gambia, spatial analysis of infant mortality in Victorian London, sexual and reproductive health in Tanzania, and interactions between ageing and employment in the UK.

Who is it for?

Social and political scientists, mathematicians, geographers – this course is perfect for anyone interested in population and its relation to health and wider social and environmental change. You might be a professional working in government or for an NGO where demographic skills are in high demand. Or you might have just finished your undergraduate degree and want to pursue an MSc which will equip you to contribute solutions to some of today’s most pressing global challenges.