DuPRI was created to bring together the many faculty and post-doctoral researchers at Duke who are already involved in innovative interdisciplinary demographic and population research investigations. DuPRI’s goals are:

• To organize the breadth and depth of population research at Duke into a synergistic whole much greater than the sum of its parts,
  
• To attract to the Duke faculty some of the field’s most highly acclaimed researchers as well as some of the field's most outstanding new talent, and
  
• To expand the intellectual activity at Duke devoted to population research in the classroom as well as in the laboratory and in the field.

To accomplish these goals DuPRI is organized around two broad research programs – our program in Health and Human Development and our program in Aging. The program in Health and Human Development currently has four areas of substantive strength:

• Population Health and Health Disparities,
  
• Child and Human Development,
  
• Family Demography and
  
• Social and Economic Inequality.

The program in Aging addresses Aging issues from both a Biological Science and Social Science perspective. Key areas of strength include:

• Social, Behavioral, and Biological aspects of Longevity,
  
• Social, Behavioral, and Biological aspects of Health Disparities in Aging
  
• Evolutionary Biodemography

Within these substantive areas faculty use an unusually wide set of methods, many of which have been pioneered by our researchers. Four groups of methods stand out:

• Statistical and Mathematical Modeling,
  
• Measurement of Biological Processes and Analyses of their Influence,
  
• Analyses of Networks and their Influence and
  
• Ethnography and Mixed Methods.
  

 
DuPRI gives Duke University an internationally-recognized world-class asset in the field of population research. Institute members have joined together to push the current boundaries of investigation, especially by including faculty researchers from a broad and exciting set of disciplines, including the life sciences. DuPRI is affiliated with Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI).