Demographers study the way populations change. The things they might focus on include births and deaths, living conditions, and age distributions. In the United States, population changes are tracked nationally by the Census Bureau. A conversation with the retired chief demographer of the U.S Census Bureau with Howard Hogan is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories.

Hogan is the former chief demographer of the U.S. Census Bureau and studied at Princeton’s Office of Population Research, and its School of Public Affairs. He then spent two years teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam and working on the Tanzanian census. He joined the Census in 1979. He worked on household surveys, business surveys, and the population census. He led the statistical design of the 2000 Census. He served as an expert witness in Utah v Evans, in which the Supreme Court considered the use of imputation in the Census 2000. He served as Associate Director for Demographic Programs and later as Census Bureau’s Chief Demographer. He taught as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics of George Washington University. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was awarded the 2018 Jeanne E. Griffith Mentoring Award. He retired from federal service in 2018.