David A. Swanson, longtime ASA member and professor emeritus at the University of California at Riverside, is the 2026 recipient of the Mindel C. Sheps Award, given by the Population Association of America. The award is presented biennially for outstanding contributions to mathematical demography or demographic methodology.
Swanson has made many influential contributions to demography over the years, including developing methods for predicting future population size, most notably the cohort change ratio method. He also advanced the theoretical foundations of formal demography by linking these methods to stable population theory and life expectancy estimation.
Throughout his career, Swanson has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed articles and nine books, served on the US Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee—including two terms as chair—and testified before Congress and state legislatures as state demographer for both Alaska and Arkansas.
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