People

Research Interests:

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.  He has been active in international efforts to promote research transparency, data sharing, and secure access to confidential research data, and he has worked on new metadata standards that improve the reusability and interoperability of research data.  His current projects aim to automate the capture of metadata from statistical analysis software, describe Demographic Transitions around the world, and create a FAIR vocabulary of terms used in population research.