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Office of Population Research, Princeton University | |
| 241 Wallace Hall, Princeton NJ 08544 • Phone: (609) 258-4872 • email: grodri@Princeton.edu |
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Office of Population Research, Princeton University | |
| 241 Wallace Hall, Princeton NJ 08544 • Phone: (609) 258-4872 • email: grodri@Princeton.edu |
I was trained as a Biostatistician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, having previously obtained a Master's degree in Social Science at the University of Chicago. My undergraduate work in my native Chile was in Psychology, where I discovered my love for statistics while studying psychometrics with Erika Himmel. A job as a statistical assistant to Anibal Faundes in a fertility survey led to a life-long interest in population.
Following completion of my Ph.D. I worked for seven years at the World Fertility Survey (WFS) in London, England, and then spent five years in the Statistics Department at the Universidad Católica de Chile, before coming to the Office of Population Research, where I have been since 1987, enjoying working with wonderful colleagues.
Welcome to my home page! This website collects a few pages related to my research and teaching.
My main research interest is statistical demography, the development and application of statistical modeling techniques to the study of human population. My subject areas include fertility and health.
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See the multilevel section for some of my work on multilevel models, including my papers with Noreen Goldman, and links to the datasets used in those papers, including both actual and simulated data. The Handbook of Multilevel Analysis, edited by Jan de Leeuw and Erik Meijer, was officially published on Friday December 21, 2007. I contributed Chapter 9 on 'Generalized Linear Mixed Models'. |
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In other recent work I have looked at tempo effects in fertility and mortality, and have a paper in Demographic Research with a critical view of tempo adjustments in mortality estimation.
Each fall I teach a course on generalized linear models, which covers regression models for continuous data (multiple regression, analysis of variance and analysis of covariance), for binary data (including logistic regression and probit models), for count data (Poisson, over-dispersed Poisson and negative binomial models) and for time to event or survival data (mostly piece-wise exponential hazard models using the Poisson-trick). We usually include a bit on log-linear models for contingency tables, but the last couple of years we substituted a week on models for longitudinal and panel data, including fixed and random-effects models.
The course website includes a set of lecture notes, available in pdf format as well as html, and a collection of Stata logs that show how to obtain every result in the notes using the popular statistical package Stata. Depending on the time of the year you also see problem sets and exams, with solutions. Sometimes I hear from students in remote corners of the globe who have found these materials useful.
In the Spring of 2008 I will be teaching to half-semester courses, one on Survival Analysis and one on Multilevel Models. I taught these courses once before in the Spring of 2005. The corresponding sections of the website, while less extensive than the section on GLMs, have a collection of handouts with emphasis on computation.
In the Spring of 2006 I taught Research Methods in Demography. The demography section of the website has handouts that use Stata to do demographic calculations organized under 12 different topics ranging from rates and standardization to stable populations. There are also four problem sets with solutions. I will be teaching this course again in the Spring of 2008 but I anticipate that there will be substantially less emphasis on demographic computation.
In my spare time I have developed the web software used since 2002 by the Population Association of America (PAA) to manage its annual meetings, including online submissions and reviews. The system has also been used by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS), and more recently the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS). I am particularly proud of the IUSSP site, which is available in English, French, and Spanish. All these sites run from the same code base (written in C#), using resource strings for localization.