Rebecca Sear
Brunel University London
rebecca.sear@brunel.ac.uk
I am Professor of Population Health in the Population Studies Group at LSHTM. My background is interdisciplinary: after an education in Zoology (Nottingham University), Statistics and Biological Anthropology (Unversity College London), I moved into demography in my first lectureship at the London School of Economics, where I spent 8 years before moving to Durham University and then LSHTM in 2012.
I'm interested in interdisciplinary approaches in demography, incorporating anthropological and biological perspectives, and in promoting comparative, cross-cultural work in demography, making use of data from all world regions. I have particular research interests in relationships between family and fertility, and health and demographic outcomes. Alongside my research programme, I am interested in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion, and currently serve on an institutional working group to improve research culture. I have just stepped down as Honorary Secretary of the British Society for Population Studies. I tweet at @rebeccasear
Selected recent publications
Brown, L.J. & Sear, R. (2021) How do reproduction, parenting and health cluster together? Exploring diverging destinies, life histories and weathering in two UK cohort studies. Advances in Life Course Research https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2021.100431 OSF page with fulltext and supplementary material
Raybould, A. & Sear, R. (2020) Children of the (gender) revolution: a theoretical and empirical synthesis. Population Studies 75(2): 169-190 https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2020.1851748
Sear, R., Sheppard, P., & Coall, D. (2019) Cross-cultural evidence does not support universal acceleration of puberty in father-absent households. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B 374: 20180124 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0124
Sear, R. (2017) Family and fertility: does kin help influence women’s fertility and how does this vary worldwide? Population Horizons 14(1): 18-34 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/186327819.pdf
Wells, J.C.K., Nesse, R., Sear, R., Johnstone, R., Stearns, S. (2017) Evolutionary public health: introducing the concept. Lancet 390(10093): 500-509 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30572-X
Sear, R., Lawson, D.W., Kaplan, H. & Shenk, M.K. (2016) Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B 371: 20150144 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0144