The Asian Population Association Council (2009-2010)

A short Biosketch

President

Leela Visaria (Ph.D., Sociology, Princeton University) was a Director of Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad, India during 2003-2006 and professor at the same Institute since 1987. Beginning March 2008 she has been awarded National Professorship for two years by Indian Council for Social Science Research, a parent body of social science research institutes in India. Her research interests include historical demography, field based studies on problems of health, family planning, education and demographic transition. Her articles have appeared in several scholarly journals. She has been a co author or editor of five books on Contraceptive Use and Fertility in India; Maternal Education and Child Survival: Pathways and Evidence; India in the 21st Century; Children Without Childhood and Abortion in India: Ground Realities.

During 1994-2005, she served as a coordinator of a national network ? HealthWatch - of non governmental organizations (NGOs) and researchers. The network has held a series of regional consultations and national meetings to engage in dialogue with the policy makers, officials, donors, researchers and activists on various women?s health issues including improving the quality of care. She has been on the academic councils and/or governing boards of several academic institutes and NGOs. 

Vice President

Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi is Associate Professor of Demography at the Department of Demography, University of Tehran; and Adjunct Fellow, Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI), The Australian National University. He was the Head of the Department of Demography of the University of Tehran during 2002-2006. His main research has focused on Iran?s fertility transition but he has also worked on other areas including family change, reproductive health/infertility, Afghan refugees in Iran, and Australian immigrant groups. He has conducted surveys on the remarkable fall of fertility in Iran, the results of which have been published. His recent book co-authored with Peter McDonald and Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi titled Revolution and Reproduction is forthcoming from Springer.

Dr Abbasi-Shavazi has been a member of the IUSSP since 1997. He is currently a member of Board of Trustees of the ICDDR,B; member of the International Advisory Board of the journal Asian Population Studies; Research Fellow of the Economic Research Forum (ERF); member of the Developmental Idealism Studies group of the University of Michigan; and a member of Management Committee of the Canadian Refugee Research Network. He is a member of the Research Council of the Iranian Center for Population Studies in Asia and the Pacific. During 2007-2008 he served as the Chair of the Establishment Committee of the Asian Population Association.

Secretary General

Anthony T.P.L. Abeykoon is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Health Policy, Sri Lanka. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Population Division in the Ministry of Health, government of Sri Lanka. He holds a Masters degree in population studies from Cornell University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in population planning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an alumnus of the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India.

Dr. Abeykoon has served in the Ministries of Economic Planning, Plan Implementation and Health of the government of Sri Lanka for nearly four decades and has contributed immensely to the field of demography in Sri Lanka and in the formulation and implementation of population policies and strategies. He was the President of the Population Association of Sri Lanka during 1998 to 2002. His research has been published in many national and international journals. He is a visiting lecturer at the Post Graduate Institute of Medicine and at the Department of Demography of the University of Colombo.

Dr. Abeykoon has a wide range of experience as a consultant. He was a Consultant to the Planning Commission of the government of Bangladesh and to the National Commission on Population and Family Planning, government of Viet Nam. He has served as a short term consultant to the Population Division of UNESCAP. He has  undertaken evaluations on population related projects for  ILO/IPEC, UNFPA, UNIFEM and the UNDP.

Dr. Abeykoon has served in a number of technical committees including the Sri Lanka Demographic and Health surveys of 1993 and 2000. He was the Project Director of a number of UNFPA funded projects on population and reproductive health implemented  in Sri Lanka during 1990 to 2006.

Treasurer

Aphichat Chamratrithirong is Emeritus Professor and Adviser to Institute for Population and Social Research (IPSR), Mahidol University, Thailand. He gained A.M. Degree in Demography and Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 1976. He started working at IPSR in 1976 and became Director during1988-1996.  Professor Aphichat was among the founders of the Thai Population Association in 1987 and served as the President of Thai Population Association during 1991-1994. Between 1998 and 2003, he worked as Regional Adviser on Population Census and Survey Data Analysis, UNFPA Country Technical Services Team (CST) for East and South-East Asia. During this period, he worked closely on population issues with scholars and officials in Viet Nam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Lao PDR and Mongolia.

Professor Aphichat has been Member of the Executive Board of Planned Parenthood Association of Thailand since 2001. He has been a Member of the University Council of Huachiew Chalermprakiet University in Bangkok since 2005. He has served in WHO research steering committee for a number of years since 1985. Currently he is a member of the Specialist Panel for Social Science and Operations Research on Sexual and Reproductive Health, WHO, Geneva.

Professor Aphichat's research areas have been in the field of population and development and in social and reproductive health issues. These research areas include internal and international migration, poverty, fertility, nuptiality, health and mortality, family planning program evaluation, and reproductive health.  His current researches are on family, parenting, mental health, adolescents, sexual risk and drug use, studies of older population, and evaluation of HIV/AIDS prevention programs among adolescents, migrants, and other most at risk populations.

Council Member

Abbas Bhuiya is a Social Scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). He heads the Social and Behavioural Sciences Unit and the Poverty and Health programme of ICDDR,B. He has been with ICDDR,B since 1980. He is also the founder site leader of the Chakaria Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems of ICDDR,B established 1999 and an active member of the INDEPTH. His major research included studies of social determinants of health and mortality, and an understanding of the mechanisms of the relationship between socioeconomic factors and health and mortality. In addition, he has been studying the impact of community based social development and health programmmes on health and health inequity. He has developed a tool to measure poverty by taking into consideration of its multidimensional nature. He also has been testing rapid tools to monitor utilization of health and family planning services by the poor at the facility and community level. His current work involves an inquiry to understand health systems in Bangladesh as it exists and testing of intervention to make it work, especially for the poor. 

He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Commission on Health Research for Development (COHRED) since 2006. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Coastal Association for Social Transformation (COAST) Trust, an NGO in Bangladesh, and is the current Chair of the Board. He is also an Adjunct Professor to the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health.

Council Member

Moneer Alam, a Ph.D in Economics, is working as Professor of Economic Demography and Head of Population Research Centre, Institute of Economic Growth (Delhi, India). Dr. Alam specializes in manpower planning and forecasting and authored a book on forecasting occupational structure of employment in a developing economy. In addition, he has also published a number of research papers in peer reviewed national and international journals in areas of manpower-educational planning, labour market issues, health financing, changes in age composition and ageing, old age income security, functional health and its measurement, etc. These are in addition to more than twenty major reports, situational assessments and write-ups for several national and international bodies. He has also worked for several organizations including the WHO (India), ILO (South Pacific Office, Suva, Fiji) and a Saudi research organization (CCFI) in Riyadh. He was a WHO National Consultant in the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India.

Currently, he is working on economic and health implications of ageing in India and South Asia and has come out with a book: Ageing in India: Socio-economic and Health Dimensions (2006, Academic Foundation, New Delhi). Professor Alam also holds membership of several professional bodies and organizations including the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), Indian Association for the Study of Population, Indian Labour Economics Association, Indian Econometric Society, etc. He was nominated by the IUSSP to its Scientific Committee on Ageing in Developing Countries. He is in the editorial board of the International Journal of Social Quality (previously The European Journal of Social Quality), Berghahn Journals, New York and Oxford.

Council Member

Naohiro Ogawa is Professor of Population Economics at the Advanced Research Institute for Sciences and Humanities (ARISH) of Nihon University, Tokyo. He is also Director of the Nihon University Population Research Institute (NUPRI).He holds a PhD. degree in economics from the University of Hawaii. Over the past 25 years he has written extensively on population and development in Japan and other Asian countries. More specifically, his research has focused on issues such as socioeconomic impacts of low fertility and rapid aging, modeling demographics and social security-related variables, as well as policies related to fertility, employment, marriage, child care, retirement and care for the elderly. His recent work includes measuring intergenerational transfers. He has published numerous academic papers in internationally recognized journals such as Population and Development Review, Population Studies, Demography, American Economic Review and Journal of Labor Economics. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance and international advisory board of the Journal of Asian Population Studies.

Naohiro Ogawa has also served on a number of councils, committees and advisory boards set up by the Japanese government and international organizations such as the IUSSP and the WHO. 

Council Member

Shireen J. Jejeebhoy PhD, Senior Associate, Population Council, New Delhi, is a demographer engaged in social science research on various aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights in India. Her particular areas of focus have been gender issues and adolescent sexual and reproductive health and development and the context of abortion. The current major focus of her research is on young people?s sexual and reproductive health and rights, including the formation and experience of sexual partnerships and increasing access to abortion in India. She has written extensively on issues related to adolescent and young people?s sexual and reproductive health; reproductive health and population and women?s autonomy in India. She is a member of the Indian Association for the Study of Population, the IUSSP and the Population Association of America. 

Council Member

Terence H. Hull is a Professor of Demography at the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI), and John C. Caldwell Chair in Population, Health and Development, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University. He has been based at the Australian National University since 1971, working on a wide range of demographic issues in Asia and the Pacific. He is best known for his work on Indonesia where he has chronicled health and family planning programs in historical, statistical and anthropological studies. Through the 1980s and 1990s. Hull applied the lessons learned in Indonesia to issues of other Asian countries, including sex ratios at birth in China, health systems reform in Vietnam, and political barriers to contraception in the Philippines.

In recent years he has focused on studies of sexuality, abortion and data problems, all of which constitute sensitive political issues, but all of which are also crucial to understanding demographic dynamics.  Professor Hull was a member of Board of Trustees of the ICDDR,B during 2001-2007 and served as the Chair of Board of the Trustees during 2005-2007. He has been a member of the Population Association of America since 1974, the IUSSP since 1976. He served as President of the Australian Population Association in 2005-2006. 

Executive Secretary

Bhassorn Limanonda is a professor in Demography, and currently the Director of College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. Professor Limanonda received MA. in Sociology from Chulalongkorn University and Cornell University, and Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University, and spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow At Brown University. She teaches several subjects in the field of Population and related fields in MA. and   Ph.D programs. Her main research interest focuses on Marriage and Family, Gender and development, and HIV/AIDS related issues. During past years, Professor Limanonda has been involved in several small and large-scale research Chulalongkorn University projects. She produces more than a hundred publications in various forms including research reports, journal articles, presentations, book chapters, and textbook.