Robert Schoen received a 1972 Ph.D. degree in Demography from the Uni-ver-sity of California, Berkeley, USA. He has been a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Johns Hopkins University, and Penn State Univer-sity, where he was the inaugural Hoffman Professor of Family Sociology and Demography. In 2004, he received the Mindel Sheps Award in Mathematical Demography/Demographic Methods from the Population Association of America.