Rate My Professor Heather Booth

Heather Booth is Professor Emerita in the School of Demography within the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences. Holding a BSc(Econ) from the University of London, an MSc from the University of Southampton, and a PhD in Demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she developed the Booth Standard during her doctoral research for use with the Brass Relational Gompertz Model of fertility. Her career spans over 40 years in demographic research across developed and developing countries. She began at the London School of Economics, moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in 1984 became a demographer with the South Pacific Commission in Nouméa, New Caledonia, working throughout the Pacific Islands. She also served as an international consultant for the United Nations and other agencies before joining ANU in 1994.

At ANU, Booth was appointed Australia’s first female Professor of Demography in 2017 and served as Director of Research for the School of Demography. She is an international expert in stochastic modelling and forecasting of mortality and populations, with research focused on mortality modelling and forecasting, population ageing, the socio-demography of longevity, mortality patterns and transitions, social networks in ageing, and microsimulation of disability at older ages. She leads the Group on Longevity, Ageing and Mortality and contributes to the Social Networks and Ageing Project. Booth was Founding Editor of the Journal of Population Research from 2000 to 2006, an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, a former Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and served on the Advanced Grants Panel of the European Research Council. Her key publications include 'Mortality modelling and forecasting: A review of methods' (2008, with L. Tickle), 'Thirty years on: A review of the Lee–Carter method for forecasting mortality' (2023, with U. Basellini and C.G. Camarda), 'Education-related inequalities in cause-specific mortality: First estimates for Australia' (2021, with J. Welsh et al.), and 'Coherent Mortality Forecasting: The Product-Ratio Method with Functional Time Series Models' (2012). She has produced 70 research outputs and is cited over 7,500 times. Awards include election as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA) in 2021, the ANU College Award for Excellence in Supervision in 2012, and first prize for her poster on 'Mortality Forecasting: Methods and Software'.