Laureation Address: Professor Philip Rees CBE FBA
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science
Laureation by Professor Nissa Finney, School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Thursday 4 July 2025 – morning ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Professor Philip Rees.
Professor Rees’s contribution to population sciences, over five decades, has shaped the systems that are used internationally to measure and forecast populations. His work on projection of migration and sub-national population change has been particularly significant and influential. His scholarship has shaped census methodology and, latterly, developed novel approaches to estimation of populations by ethnic group.
His work has informed policy and practice in health, labour force, households and water demand.
Professor Rees received his BA in 1966 from the University of Cambridge and his MA and PhD, in 1968 and 1973, from the University of Chicago. He has been based at the Department of Geography at the University of Leeds since 1970, promoted to Professor of Population Geography in 1990, and as Professor Emeritus since 2017.
Throughout his career Professor Rees has worked closely with statistical authorities, including the Office for National Statistics. He has led many international collaborations and advisory roles through which he has influenced national statistical methods for population projection, most recently for the Wittgenstein Centre and the National Statistical Bureau of China.
Professor Rees has written and edited several influential texts. He was the founding editor of Routledge’s International Population Studies series. His first book, Spatial Population Analysis, published in 1977, was used by a generation of PhD students and post-doctoral researchers to learn about the methods of spatial population analysis.
Professor Rees’s contributions have been recognised through prestigious awards and honours, including the Royal Geographical Society Gill Memorial Award in 1996 and Victoria Medal in 2009. In 1998, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, followed, in 2013, by election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2004, the Queen awarded him the honour of Commander of the British Empire for world-leading work to create a system of academic access to census data.
Professor Rees has contributed more than 300 scholarly works and continues to publish. As well as being a leading global scholar in Population Geography, Professor Rees has long been a friend of St Andrews, serving on panels, examination committees, supporting events and conferences, and nurturing the next generations of scholars.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of their major contribution to population sciences, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, on Professor Philip Rees.