ESRI Geary Lecture: Early Life Conditions and Later Life Outcomes

Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin 2.

This year's ESRI Geary Lecture will be held on Monday 7 October at 4pm at the ESRI. It will be delivered by Dr James P. Smith, RAND Corporation. 

In this year’s lecture, Dr Smith will examine the effects of childhood health on adult health and socio-economic status (SES) outcomes with equal emphasis on physical and mental health issues in childhood. The SES measures are expansive - including education, income, work and marriage. Dr Smith finds that the impacts of poor childhood health are large and similar in both Britain and the USA and that childhood mental health issues are far more central than childhood physical health problems.

Dr Smith‘s research has made important contributions on the impacts of early life events on later life economic and health outcomes, the economics of immigration, the changing economic status of racial and gender groups in the United States and the dual relation between health and economic status. He is one of the world’s leading scholars in the area of ageing and a key contributor to the establishment of a worldwide network of longitudinal surveys of ageing that includes Ireland. He has twice received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Merit Award, the most distinguished honour that the NIH grants to a researcher. He is a recipient of many other honours, including Who’s Who in America, the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin (2009), and an honorary Doctorate of the University of Stirling (2013). He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2011.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

The Geary lecture is organised each year by the ESRI and honours Dr R. C. Geary (1896 –1983), the first Director of the Institute. Dr Geary is regarded as the most eminent Irish statistician of the twentieth century. Previous lectures have been given by some of the world’s foremost scholars in the fields of economics, statistics and sociology, including a number of Nobel Prize winners.