Profile
I'm Edward, a PhD student studying West African historical demography based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I'm very much a fieldwork driven researcher and so this website is to document and showcase my own research, as well as - I hope - inspire an audience into realising the importance of describing and understanding the nature of human populations, regardless of time period.
It's a truism, that if you don't know where you've come from, you won't know where you're going. As a demographer, I am continually alarmed by the scant evidence base of basic population data for much of the developing world. This is particularly problematic for aid agencies, public health NGOs and a plethora of international organisations who work to improve healthcare in these settings with only a partial understanding of the populations in which they are working. My research aims to better understand where some populations have come from, so that others can better direct where they're going. I studied Human Geography at the University of St Andrews as an undergraduate and it was here I first became interested in the study of population in developing countries. I went on to study for an MSc in 'Population and Development' at the London School of Economics, kindly funded by an ESRC/PIC Masters studentship in Population Studies. After a couple of study stints at the University of Groningen and King's College London and a couple of trips to rural Uganda with Volunteer Uganda, I spend a year studying at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Sapienza University of Rome as part of the European Doctoral School of Demography programme. In September 2016, I returned to London and began my ESRC funded doctorate. Outside of academia, I'm passionate about adventure travel and expeditions and am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London. I undertook my first major overseas expedition to South-West Greenland in 2009, aged 18, with the British Exploring Society. I have since undertaken expeditions to Kazakhstan, Southern Norway, Indian Himalayas and Svalbard and hope to take many more! In the absence of mountains to climb, rivers to paddle down or caves to abseil into, you'll probably find me wearing a tank top of questionable taste in the Bodypump class at the local gym, trying to get that six-pack Joe Wicks promised would be so easy to get. I hope you enjoy the site. Edward March 2017 A full CV can be found below.
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