California Center for Population Research Training Program

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests a five-year renewal of the predoctoral training program in population studies at the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). CCPR is the primary center for research and training in demography and population at UCLA. CCPR faculty are concentrated in Community Health Sciences, Economics, and Sociology. Recent hiring of demographers in these departments and elsewhere on campus has increased the number of CCPR affiliates and attracted increased numbers of students interested in demography. Accordingly, funding is requested for 8 predoctoral traineeships per year, an increase of 4 over our training grant award in 2001 and the renewal in 2006. The training program that we seek to renew and expand plays a central role in CCPR-coordinated demography training at UCLA. It builds on strong graduate programs in sociology, economics and public health; a distinguished multi-disciplinary training faculty with a diverse portfolio of research than spans economic, social, and health demography; and abundant resources for population research at UCLA. We seek to train the next generation of demographers to carry out theoretically informed, methodologically sophisticated research on topics of contemporary relevance. We have built an innovative curriculum in each of the three core departments, Sociology, Economics and Community Health Sciences (CHS) and integrated interdisciplinary training in demography into their programs. For the renewal, we retain all the existing features of the successful program, added a trainee proseminar, and reorganized the program leadership. Key features to be retained include a training seminar with presentations by invited speakers, mentorship, and cross-disciplinary coursework. We add a trainee proseminar at which current and past trainees will present ongoing work to each other, read and discuss recent papers, and meet with invited faculty guests. We have reorganized program leadership to divide the management and oversight responsibilities of the current Training Committee between a small Training Committee that will meet frequently to manage the training program, and a larger Advisory Committee that will provide oversight. The program already has a remarkable record of success at producing independent investigators who now carry out cutting-edge research in social, economic, and public health demography. Of 16 trainees since 2001 who have completed their PhD, 8 are now assistant professors at major universities, 5 are postdoctoral researchers at major universities, and 1 is a Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation Health and Society Scholar.