BIO
George Alter is Research Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research integrates theory and methods from demography, economics, and family history with historical sources to understand demographic behaviors in the past. From 2007 to 2016, Alter was Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest archive of social science data, and he is a past president of the Social Science History Association. He has been active in international efforts to promote research transparency, data sharing, and secure access to confidential research data. He is currently engaged in projects to create FAIR vocabularies in population research, to automate the capture of metadata from statistical analysis software, and to compare fertility transitions in contemporary and historical populations.