William Ward Kingkade passed away on May 13, 2025, at the age of 71. As a statistician and demographer, he made significant contributions to the analysis and forecasting of socio-demographic processes in the United States and the Soviet Union and, after 1989, in the countries that formerly formed the USSR. He had had been an IUSSP since 1989.
Ward Kingkade was born in New York on March 14, 1954. He earned a BA in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by an MA and PhD in sociology from Brown University. From 1984 until his death, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 1980s and 1990s, as part of the Center for International Research team at the same bureau, he was responsible for analyzing demographic processes in the USSR and then in the states that regained their independence after 1989. He regularly assessed the quality of data from population censuses and the ongoing recording of demographic and migratory events, analyzed and modeled birth and death trends (including causes of death), and developed population projections for the USSR, the Soviet republics, and regions, according to various criteria (by age, gender, ethnic group, level of education, and occupation). In the 2000s, he turned his attention to similar analyses and forecasts for the United States as part of the national demographic projection system. In recent years, he had been interested in US household budget statistics and the housing market. Ward Kingkade was also an expert and consultant for numerous international projects. It is difficult to imagine Russian-American scientific cooperation without his participation, particularly in discussions on the specifics of fertility in the United States, initiated among others by the United Nations Population Division. He also contributed to the creation of the Human Fertility Database (Max Planck Institute in Rostock and Institute of Demography in Vienna).
Sergei V. Zakharov et Alain Blum