Mark R. Montgomery

Mark R. Montgomery is a population researcher and a professor in the economics department at Stony Brook University. He studies the increasing urbanization of the world’s population: what an urban world will look like and how we can best improve the lives of people living in cities. He is particularly interested in the effects of climate change on urban populations.

From 1999 to 2003, Montgomery served as co-chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Population Dynamics. He was lead editor of its influential 2003 report, Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World. The report provided a comprehensive analysis of the demographic, economic, social, and political features of urbanization in poor countries.

Before joining the Council in 1993, Montgomery was in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and was a Rockefeller Foundation senior fellow at the University of Lagos. He is a member of the Population Association of America and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He also sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Health; the scientific advisory board of the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital; the population sciences subcommittee initial review group of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health; the advisory board of the Urban Health Resource Centre in New Delhi, India; and the advisory board of the Integrated Demographic and Health Surveys Project (I-DHS) and the Minnesota Population Center.

He holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a PhD from the University of Michigan.