James Raymer has been appointed Professor of Demography and will take up his appointment in ADSRI at the beginning of January 2013.

Professor Raymer has moved to Canberra from the United Kingdom with his wife and their three children. He gained his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2003. He then moved to the Division of Social Statistics, School of Social Statistics at the University of Southampton where he was a Lecturer in Demography, Academic Fellow and most recently Reader in Demography.

He is a currently a member of the Editorial Boards for Demographic Research and Demography and is on the Council of Advisors for Population Europe.

Research interests

James Raymer’s research interests include migration estimation and dynamic population modelling. Prior to moving to Canberra, He led projects in Southampton on combining internal migration data, estimating consistent and complete matrices of international migration flows and dynamic population modelling. Last May, he completed a major project that brought together three international teams consisting of demographers, statisticians and migration experts. The 'Integrated Modelling of European Migration' project was funded by NORFACE, an organisation consisting of twelve research councils with the aim of increasing cooperation in research and research policy in Europe. This project produced an integrated model to overcome measurement issues and missing data for producing estimates of age- and sex-specific migration flows amongst the 31 countries in the European Union and European Free Trade Association. The estimates include information from experts and measures of uncertainty. He also led the population modelling team in the ESRC Centre for Population Change, where the research focuses on developing Bayesian models for population projection. Finally, he worked closely with the UK’s Office for National Statistics to improve their methods for estimating internal and international migration flows and to incorporate measures of uncertainty in their population statistics.