The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS), founded in 1964, studies broad policy questions involving population, resources, health, and the environment. With the mission of improving wellbeing around the world, the goal of the Center is to produce population-based evidence that will better inform policies needed to create healthy and vital societies. The Center supports an analytic and research platform that enables practitioners to work and report on large-scale, population-based studies with rich depth of demographic data.
In efforts to better understand how demographic changes interact with social and economic development worldwide, the Center brings together individuals from a wide array of disciplines to focus on five areas of primary interest: social and environmental determinants of population health; aging societies; population mobility: migration in a global economy; life course perspective; and women, work, and health. From exploring adversity and resilience after Hurricane Katrina to building sustainable capacity for research on social determinants in low- and middle-income countries, the Center creates a community that fosters collaboration and integration of intellectual capital.