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Marquis Who's Who is pleased to recognize John F. May, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. May has spent nearly five decades in demography and population policy, contributing through research, teaching, and international collaboration.
“This award summarizes a life spent on population issues and population policies around the world,” he said. “Now I bring this lifetime experience to my students at George Mason University and I continue sharing my insights through my ongoing publications.”
Since 2020, May has been a research professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses and helping shape the fields of demography and population policy. He has been a senior fellow at the Population Institute in Washington, D.C., since 2018 and an honorary professor at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, since 2021.
May has cowritten studies on U.S. population projections and coedited with Schar School Distinguished University Professor Jack A. Goldstone the International Handbook of Population Policies. May’s book, Africa’s Population: In Search of a Demographic Dividend, coedited with Hans Groth, focuses on demographic issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. He continues to contribute to academic journals and serves on editorial committees.
May’s work has been recognized with awards from the World Bank. In 2012, he received the Global Media Award for Best Book in Population for World Population Policies: Their Origin, Evolution, and Impact. He is a member of professional organizations such as the Population Association of America and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.
Previously, May was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University from 2008 to 2019. He served as a visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau from 2013 to 2017 and a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development in 2012. At the World Bank from 1997 to 2012, he worked on population and reproductive health policies in Africa. Earlier in his career, he held United Nations roles in Haiti and New Caledonia and started as a high school teacher in Brussels in 1975.
May earned a bachelor of arts in modern history from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium in 1973, followed by a graduate diploma in demography in 1975. He later obtained a master of arts in demography, magna cum laude, in 1985 from there. In 1996, he earned a PhD in demography, summa cum laude, from Université René Descartes, Paris-V (Sorbonne). Fluent in English and French, May has worked across international academic and professional settings.
Since 1899, when A.N. Marquis printed the first edition of Who's Who in America, Marquis Who's Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Who's Who in America is an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world.