London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

This MSc provides rigorous training in demography and population studies. The curriculum comprises demographic methods and theory, epidemiology, statistics and data analysis.

Many of our societies continue to face a diverse set of demographic challenges and opportunities, including rapid population ageing, extremely low as well as very high fertility, and sizable population migration. These and other demographic trends have important repercussions in all possible domains of life; from voting behavior to living arrangements, labour markets and economic growth, tax revenues and pension systems, carbon emissions, and the demand for education, health and social services. Demography, in other words, may well be the single most defining factor of the world that we live in.

The MSc Demography & Health equips students with the theories and skills to understand and quantify macro-level population dynamics and their downstream implications for health and health policies. Students are further trained in the analysis of micro-level processes that govern population change, including fertility and reproductive behaviour, the exposure to health risks, and population mobility. Analysis tools and techniques are applied to high-income settings where high-quality data are usually abundant to resource constrained settings that are covered by partial or deficient information systems.

The teaching programme gives students ample opportunity to select from a wide range of modules in statistics, epidemiology public health, and the social sciences, and thus tailor their curriculum to either focus on the technical aspects of data analytics and demographic estimation, or, take a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of population and health.

The MSc Demography & Health is recognised by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Population Investigation Committee (PIC) and a number of scholarships from these bodies are available each year.

Funding opportunities can be found on the LSHTM website.

Entry requirements

You will need the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree to undertake an MSc. This will usually require you to have a BSc degree or have completed the first three years of your medical degree.More information on intercalating an MSc at the LSHTM.

Closing date

  • All applicants are encouraged to apply as early as possible to ensure availability of a place and a timely decision on their application. This is particularly important for applicants with sponsorship deadlines.
  • Applications open in November, and close in early August.

Deadline for responding to your offer

Applicants are required to respond to their Offer of Admissions within 28 days of receipt, or their place will be released and the offer automatically declined. Please note that payment of a £500 deposit becomes payable within this period upon acceptance. It is deductible from tuition fees upon full registration with LSHTM.