Joseph Chamie is an international demographer. He is a former director of the United Nations Population Division at UN Headquarters and later a former research director at the Center for Migration Studies in New York City.
Dr. Chamie received his doctoral degree in sociology, majoring in the field of population, from the University of Michigan. He has worked in various regions of the world, specializing primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and has worked in national programs dealing with health issues.
He has first-hand experience with the diverse problems of less developed countries as well as the more developed nations. He has lived for several years in a rural Indian village working in health and also resided in areas of civil conflict, having spent six years with the United Nations in Beirut, Lebanon. He has conducted research and taught at universities in the United States and abroad.
He was with the United Nations in the field of population and developmentboth overseas and in New York City for more than a quarter century. Among other major duties, he was the deputy secretary-general for the 1994 United Nations International Conference for Population and Development.
In addition to completing numerous studies and reports issued under United Nations authorship, he has also written many studies in his own name in such areas as fertility, marriage, population estimates and projections, ageing, urbanization, mortality, gender, international migration, irregular migration and population and development policy.
He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Population Association of America, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and a trustee of the Migration Policy Institute. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.