Mark R. Montgomery is a senior associate with the Population Council's Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. He also is a professor in the economics department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His current research interests lie in three areas: the links between poverty and demographic behavior in the cities of developing countries; measurement of poverty and poverty dynamics using proxy variables; and how diffusion dynamics operate in the spread of fertility control and other innovative forms of demographic behavior.

Montgomery joined the Population Council in 1993. Before that, he had been in the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, and was a Rockefeller Foundation senior fellow at the University of Lagos. He holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1982). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population and served from 1999 to 2003 as co-chair of its Panel on Urban Population Dynamics. The panel’s report, entitled Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World, was published by the National Academy Press in 2003; he was editor of the report along with Richard Stren, Barney Cohen, and Holly Reed.