Melinda Mills

Melinda Mills (MBE, FBA) is Director, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS), University of Oxford. Her research spans multiple topics in demography, empirical sociology, statistics and genetics. Her recent work focuses on sociogenomics, combining a social science and molecular genetic approach to the study of behavioural outcomes, with a focus on reproduction (fertility), chronotype, nonstandard, precarious employment and assortative mating. Other interests include behavioural approaches to health interventions, including behavioural and policy responses to face coverings and vaccine deployment.  

She is PI (principal investigator) of the Leverhulme Trust Large Centre Grant for the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, PI of the ERC Advanced Grant CHRONO and PI of the ERC Proof of Concept Grant and social business enterprise DNA4Science. She was the PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant SOCIOGENOME and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods SOCGEN project. She was the Editor in Chief of the European Sociological Review (2012-17) and is on the Executive Council of the UKRI/ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and the Supervisory Board (Raad van Toezicht) of the Dutch National Science Council (NWO) and the UK’s Government’s SAGE sub-committee on ethnicity and Royal Society’s SET-C Committee. 

Mills’ work is widely cited and she has published 7 books and over 100 articles across multiple scientific disciplines including Nature Genetics, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Annual Review of Sociology, JAMA Psychiatry, Journal of Marriage and Family and Social Forces. She has written 2 statistical textbooks, Introducing Survival and Event History Analysis (in R)(2011) and An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis (MIT, 2020). Mills received her PhD in Demography from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (2000) and a BA and MA in Sociology, with a specialization in Demography from the University of Alberta (Canada). 

Mills has supervised over 20 PhD students, over 50 Master students and around 15 postdoctoral researchers, all of whom have gone on to successful careers and several winning international awards.

Research Areas: demography, family sociology, quantitative methods, health and well-being, genetics, social inequality