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.
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