Professor Philip Rees CBE
Professor Philip Rees CBE is to be awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) on Thursday 3 July 2025 during the morning ceremony.
Philip Rees CBE, Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds since 2009, continues to be research active, despite having reached the age of 80. He has taught and undertaken research on demographic issues for 55 years.
His recent work focused on the future size and spatial distribution of the UK’s ethnic group populations at national and local scales. This work was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for two rounds of population forecast for 2001 to 2051 and 2011 to 2061.
From this work, Professor Rees published several papers and has lobbied the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to add ethnicity to their sub-national projection suite.
Professor Rees continues to participate in international collaborations. He was a work package leader for a pan-European project, DEMIFER, on migration and population change at sub-national scale in Europe, responsible for designing scenarios and analysing outputs.
In 2016, he participated in the international project, IMAGE, led by Martin Bell (Brisbane), as lead author of a paper on the impact of internal migration on population redistribution within countries covering 80% of the world’s population. He made contributions to the international migration forecasting in the Wittgenstein Centre’s World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
As a member of the Vienna Institute of Demography advisory board, he was influential in persuading the Wittgenstein Centre to incorporate bilateral international migration flows into their subsequent 2019 and 2024 rounds of world projections. In 2013 and 2018, he provided a course of lectures on Census Methodology for visiting delegations from the National Statistical Bureau of China. He is currently collaborating with colleagues at East China Normal University on a study of Shanghai’s water security.
Professor Rees regularly contributes to scholarship in the social sciences and is a reviewer for more than a dozen journals. He served on the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 Sub-Panel for Geography and, in 2020, he convened the Social Sciences Panel of the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise. In 2022, he chaired the Estonian Research Council’s social science panel for research applications. In 2023, he reviewed the Horizon 2020 project QuantMig.