2026 Sheps Award Recipient

Congratulations David A. Swanson

Congratulations to David A. Swanson, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California Riverside, as the 2026 recipient of the Mindel C. Sheps Award. The Sheps award is presented biennially for outstanding contributions to mathematical demography or demographic methodology.

Dr. Swanson is receiving this award for his outstanding and influential contributions to demography over a long and highly productive career. He developed important innovations in demographic methods and population forecasting, most notably the cohort change ratio method and key forecasting accuracy measures such as the mean absolute percent error rescaled. He also advanced the theoretical foundations of formal demography by linking these methods to stable population theory and life expectancy estimation. In addition to his methodological contributions, his work has significantly impacted applied demography, demographic data collection, and interdisciplinary demographic research. His exceptional scholarship, prolific publication record, and lasting influence on the field made him a deserving recipient of the award.

Dr. David Swanson Bio

David A. Swanson is: (1) an Edward A. Dickson (2021) Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California Riverside; (2) Research Associate, Population Research Center, Portland State University; (3) Faculty Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington; and (4) Research Fellow, Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University. Swanson served as a member of the U. S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee for six years (2004-10) and chaired the committee for two (2009-2010). He has been in a number of professional association roles, to include serving: as the general editor for Springer’s Applied Demography series; a member of the mortality expert panel of the Society of Actuaries Research Institute; as the Secretary-Treasurer (1995-7 and 2003-7) of the Southern Demographic association; and as the editor of its official journal, Population Research and Policy Review (2004-7). He currently is serving a two-year term on the editorial board of International Journal of Population Studies. Swanson has completed numerous consulting assignments, served as an expert witness in court proceedings and testified before Congress, state legislatures and local government bodies. He has received two Fulbright awards and more than $2.7 million in grants and contracts. Swanson has produced 137 refereed sole- and co-authored journal articles and nine books, mainly dealing with demography, especially methods for doing small area estimation and forecasting. He also has edited or co-edited five additional books. Among other professional recognitions, he is a member of Washington State Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences, and  served as a “summer at census” scholar in June, 2019, U.S. Census Bureau. His B.Sc. is from Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University), and his Ph.D. and M.A. are from the University of Hawai’i. He also holds a Graduate Diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Stockholm. Website

Award Committee

Chair Claire Yang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Kenneth C. Land, Duke University; Noreen Goldman, Princeton University; Joshua Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley; Scott M. Lynch, Duke University; Adrian Raftery, University of Washington; Roland Rau, University of Rostock