Richard Cincotta is a Wilson Center Global Fellow with the Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, and Director of the Global Political Demography Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. His current research focuses primarily on the political effects of the age-structural transition. Additionally, his published research includes studies of the political implications of sub-national demographic change in Israel and on fertility trends in Iran.

Dr. Cincotta served as the Director of Demographic and Social Science Programs in the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council’s (NIC’s) Long Range Analysis Unit (2006-09), and he contributed to three of the NIC’s quadrennial Global Trends (GT) reports: GT 2025, 2030 and 2035. Previously, he worked in the Policy and Evaluation Division of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in the Office of Population and Reproductive Health (1992-96), and as a senior demographer at PAI, a non-governmental reproductive health organization (1996-2006). His analyses of the impacts of demographic change appear in Foreign Policy, Current History, Nature and Science.

Dr. Cincotta is also the lead author on several publications that have had a broad impacts on conservation biology and international relations: Nature’s Place: Human Population and the Future of Biological Diversity (PAI, 2000), and The Security Demographic: Population and Conflict After the Cold War (PAI, 2004). He is also the author of recent research on the: Age-structural Theory of State Behavior (Oxford University Press Encyclopedia on Empirical International Relations, in press), and on political demographic analyses of Iran and Israel.

Dr. Cincotta served in the U.S. Navy (1969-73) and has lived and worked in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and Western Europe, as well as in Australia and Canada, including five years abroad in field research positions in Morocco, western India, and in western China (Qinghai Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Region). He trained and initially worked as a population biologist, receiving his PhD & MS from Colorado State University, and BS from SUNY College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry/Syracuse University.