David Voas (born 1955) is a quantitative social scientist. He is currently Professor of Social Science and Head of the Department of Social Science at the

UCL Institute of Education IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (IOE) is the education school of University College London (UCL). It specialises in postgraduate study and research in the field of education and is one of UCL's 11 constituent faculties. Prior to ...

. He was previously Professor of Population Studies at the

University of Essex The University of Essex is a public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the ancient arms attributed to the Kingdom of Es ...

and Simon Professor of Population Studies at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

. Voas is on the executive committee of the European Values Study and is co-director of British Religion in Numbers, an online centre for British data on religion. He serves on the council of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion and on the editorial boards of the ''British Journal of Sociology'' and the ''Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion''. His research concerns religious change and value change in modern societies, the intergenerational transmission of religion and values, and attitudes of and towards ethno-religious minorities.

Early life

David Voas was born in the United States. His father is Robert B. Voas, a psychologist who had a key role in selecting and training the first group of NASA astronauts and in recent decades has been a leader in policy research on alcohol and highway safety. David Voas left the US at the age of 15 to attend

Atlantic College Atlantic College (formally the United World College of the Atlantic; alternatively styled UWC Atlantic College, UWCAC, or UWCA) is an independent boarding school in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales. Founded in 1962, it was the first of t ...

, an international school in South Wales. He subsequently received bachelor's and master's degrees from

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 mill ...

and a PhD from

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...

Career

Voas worked in the private sector for a number of years and also spent extended periods outside the UK, particularly in France, the United States, and Bulgaria.

Academic career

He returned to academic life in 1998, first as a researcher at the University of Liverpool and subsequently as a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded a Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 2003 and remained there for eight years, first in the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research and later in the Institute for Social Change. In 2007, he was promoted to

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

and given a chair in the Institute for Social Change, later merged into the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research. Voas was Professor of Population Studies in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex from November 2011 to January 2016. He took up his present position at UCL in February 2016.

References

Living people British sociologists Alumni of the London School of Economics Alumni of the University of Cambridge Academics of the University of Manchester 1955 births People educated at Atlantic College {{UK-academic-bio-stub