Professor Ross Macmillan is the Chair in Sociology at the University of Limerick, Ireland.  He is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Queen’s University Canada, and the University of Winnipeg.  After a short lectureship at Queen’s, he joined the faculty in Sociology at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities where he was an assistant professor and then associate professor with tenure.  During this time, he undertook training in formal demography at Stanford University and was director of the graduate program in population studies.  He then joined the faculty in Policy Analysis and Public Management (now Social and Political Sciences) at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy and was the director of the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics.  Subsequent to this, he helped design the PhD in Public Policy and Administration before being appointed its inaugural director.   

A sociologist and demographer, his research has focused on crime and victimization, child development and the life course, family relationships, and social epidemiology.  His current research focuses on the empowerment/marginality of historically disadvantaged groups and impacts upon population health with a recent paper “Gender and the Politics of Death” was published in the journal Demography and covered in the UK Times, the Irish Daily Mail, and Clare FM.  Alone and in collaboration, his work has been funded by the European Union, the European Research Council, the National Science Foundation (USA), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  

He is the author of almost fifty articles, chapters, books, and reviews and he is among the most cited sociologists of his generation. His most recent work focuses on the uneven patterning of social and economic development with a specific emphasis on empowerment and marginality of subpopulations (e.g., the poor, women, children, the elderly, people with disabilities) and its implications for population health.  A recent paper focuses on changes in female political empowerment and its impact on child and maternal mortality with a specific focus on the intervening roles of extent of democracy and socio-economic development.   

He is particularly committed to teaching and mentoring.  He has supervised or co-supervised over 35 PhD dissertations with students placed and tenured at several top 50 universities.  He has also advised or co-advised almost 30 Master’s theses with recent PhD placements at Cambridge, Duke, European University Institute, Harvard, Indiana University, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Oxford, Princeton, and Wisconsin.  He frequently co-authors with students and currently has almost a dozen peer reviewed papers with former students.  

He lectures extensively internationally and has been a consultant or scientific advisor to organisations in Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, the UK, and the United States.