Revised April 1, 2026 Thomas Kirby Burch Thomas Kirby Burch, Professor Emeritus in the department of Sociology at Western University, Canada, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, passed away on July 26, 2022 at the age of 87, after a long and distinguished scholarly and teaching career. Professor Burch --- Tom, to all that knew him well ---, is remembered as a brilliant scholar, teacher and mentor and an inspiring influence to his former students and colleagues. As a longtime member of the Population Association of America (PAA) and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), Tom made significant contributions to the fields of fertility and family planning, families and households, demographic theory, and the teaching of demography as a scientific discipline.
Thomas K. Burch was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 15, 1934. He was one of three sons born to his parents, Thaddeus and Frances Burch. All three sons attended Catholic schools in Baltimore and pursued a graduate education. Tom’s oldest brother Francis Burch completed his Ph.D. in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and taught literature at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Tom’s other brother Thaddeus Burch completed his Ph.D. in physics at Fordham University and was professor in the Department of Physics at Marquette University. Both of Tom’s brothers pursued Catholic religious careers and were ordained Jesuit priests.
Tom is survived by his wife Karen and daughters Julia, Margaret, Karli, son Soren and six grandchildren. He is predeceased by son Thaddeus.
After graduation from high school in Baltimore in 1952, Tom enrolled in Loyola College, Maryland and received his B.A. degree in political science in 1956. He enrolled in graduate studies at Fordham University, where he took his first courses in population studies and completed his M.A. degree in sociology in 1957. With his strong interest in population studies, he pursued further graduate studies at Princeton University in 1957, one of the leading centers for the study of demography in the 1950s. While enrolled at Princeton from 1957 to 1960, he participated in the activities of the Office of Population Research and receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1962, when he submitted his dissertation entitled “Internal Migration in Venezuela: A Methodological Study”.
Before completing his Ph.D. degree, he had started his career as an Assistant Professor at Marquette University in 1960. Upon completing his Ph.D., he became an Associate Professor at Georgetown University from 1963 to 1970. Professor Burch organized the Center for Population Research at Georgetown, which become one of two important population research centers at Catholic universities in the United States (Fordham University in New York also has a population program). During this period, Tom and his colleagues expanded research for American Catholics on fertility, marriage, and the family. While at Georgetown University, he served as a member of the important Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control from 1964 to 1966. The Commission’s majority concluded that the use of contraceptives should be regarded as an extension of the already accepted cycle method. The Papal Commission counseled that Catholic magisterial teaching on the immorality of contraception be changed, which raised public expectations for possible liberalization of Catholic teaching about contraception. In 1968, however, Pope Paul VI issued his famous encyclical Humanae vitae that reaffirmed traditional magisterial teaching.
Tom Burch joined the Population Council in 1970 and became the Associate Director of the Demography Division. While at the Population Council, he continued research related to the study of marriage and the family, sociological analysis of fertility, and issues involving Catholic fertility. One of Professor Burch’s most innovative contributions while at the Population Council was a large survey of Catholic priests in Colombia, the Netherlands, and the United States, which involved getting the approval of Catholic authorities to interview diocesan priests in three countries on the topic of fertility and contraception. The publication of “Catholic Parish Priests and Birth Control: A Comparative Study of Opinion in Colombia, the United States, and the Netherlands” in Studies in Family Planning in 1971 and other publications influenced discussions of what priests thought and taught and their interaction with the Catholic public.
In 1975, Tom joined the Department of Sociology as Professor at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), where he was Department Chair during 1982 to 1985 and was faculty member for 25 years before retiring in 2000. He had a significant role in establishing a Ph.D. program in Social Demography. He was a young man when he arrived in 1975, but his intellectual breadth and personal connections in the discipline were very instrumental to the credentials needed for a new Ph.D. program. By promoting collegial relationships with faculty, staff and graduate students, Tom contributed greatly to the education and research at the Population Studies Centre. His research on family planning and fertility expanded to a wider area of family demography, including household formation, methods for the study of families and households, remarriage, kinship analysis, and life transitions and trajectories. Canadian and international students profited from his active research profile and his creative thoughts on theory and methods. His collegiality and broad international connections brought supportive connections with Statistics Canada and other government agencies dealing with population questions. He became Professor Emeritus at Western University in 2000 and was Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria since 2001. In 2013, Professor Burch received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Canadian Population Society.
Tom was a consummate researcher and teacher. His publications appear in prestigious and influential journals including Demography, Population Studies, Population Index, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Studies in Family Planning. He visited and lectured at prominent institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley (1965-66), Fordham University (1973-75), United Nations Latin American Demographic Centre (CELADE, 1974), University of Victoria (1992), University of Rome (1993), and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany (1998).
With John Bongaarts and Kenneth Wachter, Tom co-edited Family Demography: Methods and their Applicability, published in 1987 by Oxford University Press as part of Oxford's International Studies in Demography Series. This work was the culmination of an endeavor initiated by a Committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population whose mandate was to promote research in the then emerging sub-discipline of family demography. Family Demography contains contributions by leading figures in demography, including Nathan Keyfitz, Norman Ryder and Samuel H. Preston among others. Tom's chapter, co-authored with Shiva Halli, Ashok Madan, Kausar Thomas and Lokky Wai, reviewed and updated "Measures of Household Composition and Headship Based on Aggregate Routine Data". At the time of its publication, Family Demography provided researchers a needed overview of the literature, thereby helping this field flourish as a prominent area of population studies.
A recurring theme of Tom Burch’s work was his interest in advancing demographic theory. His quest was to demonstrate that the field of demography, often thought to be exclusively an empirical discipline, already had models that point toward useful systematization and codification. He felt that many of the usual demographic techniques, beside their empirical heuristics, share theoretical underpinnings of population processes.
Early in his career, Tom recognized that scholars from the life sciences and the social sciences could help demography expand its macro theoretical foundations to encompass micro theoretical perspectives of decision-making and behavior. In 1977, he organized an interdisciplinary symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) with the objective of bringing together contributions of experts from different disciplines and schools of thought on the use of models or theories of demographic action in the study of population phenomena. This endeavor resulted in Tom's 1980 edited volume, Demographic Behavior: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Decision-Making (AAAS Selected Symposium No. 45).
In his last major work, Model-Based Demography: Essays on Integrating Data, Technique and Theory (Springer Open Demographic Research Monograph, 2018), Tom expanded on his earlier theoretical interests. Consistent with his view that demography encompasses a body of theoretical knowledge, as well as a body of data, techniques, and descriptive findings, in this work, he encouraged instructors to incorporate more theory in their teaching, and in particular, abstract models of population dynamics and demographic decision-making. As well, he emphasized the use of computer modeling and simulation to help demographers conceptualize and evaluate theories. Through this approach, students could apply the theoretical models learned in class to solve realistic problems and exercises. He also advocated that instructors should rely extensively on the use of visual representations in lectures and textbooks for representing ideas about population processes, not just exclusively for graphing data. Tom felt that application of these ideas in the classroom would help students expand their ability to reason demographically, explain, predict, or suggest policy interventions, and the same time, would help boost the status of demography as a scientific discipline.
To his students, Professor Burch was an enthusiastic and inspirational teacher. At the undergraduate level, he ensured that demography and the family were a central parts of sociology courses. His graduate seminars stimulated students to pursue innovative research questions in family and household demography. Tom was primary advisor to eight Ph.D. students and served on a large number of other supervisory committees, overall making a major contribution to students' education and professional careers.
Tom wrote well, with unusual clarity and thoughtfulness. He also wrote quickly and could produce a draft paper while others might still be organizing their thoughts. Although he was an active participant in scientific debates, he never become angry or failed to show respect for others. He expressed himself forcefully when he believed he had evidence but was always tactful. Professor Burch was an outstanding colleague and friend. Whether it be at meetings or in casual conversations, he would invariably bring discussions to a higher level of intellectual exchange.
Tom Burch had an inventive mind for approaching existing topics from a new perspective. Even if you knew Tom for many years, he could surprise you with a new question about something that you would assume was well known. He continued to have a curious intellect over the years. For example, most demographers are familiar with presenting numbers as rates or ratios or expressing very small and very large numbers with scientific notation, such as stating 140,000,000 as 1.4 times 10˄8 power. Nevertheless, Burch became interested in other ways for demographers to express numbers and authored an interesting technical report entitled “On the Use of Engineering Notation in Demography” in 2021 when he was age 86.
For those who knew him well, Tom had an ironic sense of humor. Upon finding out French research had shown that red wine had a beneficial effect on serum cholesterol levels, he observed that he could now order a pastrami sandwich as long as he also had a large glass of burgundy.
Research and teaching were central endeavors in Tom's life. He loved teaching, and held great respect for academia and for science in general. The influential cosmologist and planetary scientist Carl Sagan once observed that, “Science is much more than a body of knowledge. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they do not conform to our preconceptions.” For demography, Tom Burch was one of our leaders that invited in the facts and tried to improve our body of knowledge. His former colleagues, students and friends are proud and honored to have known and worked with such a brilliant inspirational scholar and mentor.