Leadership

Joshua Goldstein

Joshua Goldstein

Director

Josh Goldstein directs the Population Center, and is also Chancellor’s Professor of Demography. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2013 after serving as Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. His research interest include fertility, marriage, mathematical demography, racial and ethnic demography, and population aging. He serves as PI on the CenSoc Project, linking the Full Count 1940 Census with Social Security death records, and is Director of the Workshop in Formal Demography.

Website: https://jrgoldstein.com/

Ronald D. Lee

William Dow

Associate Director

William Dow, CEDA Director, is the Kaiser Permanente Professor of health economics at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and previously served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. His research focuses on the economics of global health changes. He currently is also PI on CADAS, a study to understand aging and dementia in the Caribbean.

Website: http://sph.berkeley.edu/william-dow

Michelle Poulin

Executive Director

Michelle Poulin joined the Berkeley Population Center in late 2021, after spending eight years as a Sociologist at the Africa Gender Innovation Lab at the World Bank. She is a social demographer whose empirical work focuses mainly on gender dynamics and family life, much of this in contexts of social and economic change in Africa. She was also the PI of the Marriage Transitions in Malawi project. At the Population Center she directs a range of activities, including those involving strategic planning, general operations, and programs.

Josh Quan

Director of Computing

Joshua Quan joined the Berkeley Population Sciences Center in 2023 to provide leadership for its research computing infrastructure. He has experience supporting data science initiatives at UC Berkeley and Stanford University as a data librarian and technologist.

Max Méndez Beck

Research Program Manager

Max Méndez Beck joined the Berkeley Population Sciences Center in 2024 to manage its grants portfolio and lead the organization of workshops and conferences. He holds a Research Masters in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Prior to joining the BPC he worked at a variety of social science research centers, including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).