Richard (Rick) G. Rogers has been a leading demographer of mortality and health in the United States since the mid-1980s. He is currently Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU). Remarkably, he has spent his entire academic career at CU, starting as an assistant professor in 1985 and extending to the present. Over the years, he has been instrumental in helping to build the population program at CU, including his service as Director of the CU Population Program from 2004 to 2016. He did so while being a leading researcher in his areas of study, a trusted mentor to many graduate and undergraduate students, and an active participant in the Population Association of America. He also served as President of the Southern Demographic Association in 1997-98.
Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Rick earned his B.A. in Sociology from the University of New Mexico. After a brief stint working as a research programmer at the New Mexico Cancer Research and Treatment Center, he found his way to the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where he earned his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) in Sociology, under the direction of Dudley Poston and Terry Sullivan. While studying at UT, Rick became immersed in the rich academic environment of the Population Research Center and centered his research training on the study of mortality patterns, trends, and disparities in the United States. More specifically, his dissertation focused on infant mortality, and was entitled Evaluating Infant Mortality: Component Trends, Measures, and Standards. Moreover, Rick became interested in the epidemiologic transition around this time and, together with Robert Hackenberg, published an extension of epidemiologic theory in Social Biology that has been very well cited over the years.
Over his academic career to date, Rick has published two books, over 100 peer-reviewed articles, 17 book chapters, and four encyclopedia entries. Among some of notable achievements, he was the lead author of the book (with Robert Hummer and Charles Nam), Living and Dying in the USA: Behavioral, Health, and Social Differentials of Adult Mortality, published by Academic Press in 2000, which was the recipient of the Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award from the Section on Population of the American Sociological Association in 2002. Later, in collaboration with Eileen Crimmins in 2011, he co-edited the International Handbook of Adult Mortality (Springer Publishers), which has served as an important reference for the worldwide community of mortality researchers. As of early 2024, he has published seven articles in Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America, along with articles in many other leading journals of population studies, sociology, gerontology, public health, epidemiology, and medicine. Illustrating just a bit of the impact of his work, he has been cited over 12,000 times in his career to date, with 36 of his publications having been cited over 100 times.
Many of Rick’s publications in the last seven or so years focused on early life (ages 0-24) mortality trends and disparities in the United States. That body of his work, which was funded by a grant project he led from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was highlighted in a Population Bulletin (Population Reference Bureau) that he and several colleagues published in 2022 and which has drawn significant scholarly and media attention. In earlier portions of his career, Rick also was a major contributor toward the better understanding of active life expectancy, neighborhood effects on individual-level mortality risk, racial and ethnic disparities in mortality, socioeconomic and sex differentials in mortality, and family ties and social relationships associated with mortality risk. Beyond his thematic contributions to the study of U.S. mortality and population health, another clear hallmark of Rick’s work is his intense attention to methodological detail. Indeed, Rick is well known among his collaborators and students for having an especially keen sense for analyzing and using data with extraordinary care and precision.
Rick has mentored dozens of early career scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students across his career. Many of his graduate students are placed in leading academic and government positions and have become the next generation of population health and mortality scholars throughout the United States. Rick is kind, soft-spoken, and humble as a colleague and mentor. Rick has also worked diligently, day in and day out, thus serving as a clear example of the kind of work ethic it takes to succeed at the highest level as a population scientist and demographer. For all of these reasons, his long list of colleagues, students, mentors, and friends are very proud to honor him as a PAA Honored Colleague.