James R. Carey is an entomologist, biodemographer, author and academic. He is Distinguished Professor of Entomology at the University of California, Davis and Senior Scholar in the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) at UC Berkeley. Carey is most known for his research on biodemography and fruit fly invasion biology. The Stanford University and Elsevier Press ranking system for scientists that lists most-cited authors in 2021-22 listed him in the top 2% of most cited entomologists worldwide. He has demographer-named mathematical discovery, known as the Carey Equality, which equates years lived and years left in replacement populations. He is a co-author of the book Biodemography: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods with Deborah A. Roach, and Longevity Records: Life Spans of Mammals, Birds, Amphibians and Reptiles with Debra S. Judge as well as the author of other books, including Applied Demography for Biologists, and Longevity: The Biology and Demography of Life Span, along with over 200 journal articles and book chapters. He is the recipient of C. W. Woodworth Award, Distinguished Service Award, and Distinguished Teaching Award from the UC Davis Academic Senate, and Two Distinguished Teaching Awards from the Entomological Society of America. Carey is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Gerontological Society of America (GSA), California Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the Entomological Society of America (ESA). He serves as a Co-designer and Adviser for the Cameroon-based NGO Agriculture for Africa.
Education Carey earned his Bachelor of Science in Fisheries and Wildlife Biology from Iowa State University in 1973, followed by a Master of Science in entomology in 1975. He pursued his Ph.D. in entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, completing the program in 1980 under the mentorship of Robert van den Bosch and Carl Huffacker. During the 1978 academic year, he was a visiting Ph.D. student at Harvard University, working in the laboratories of population biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins.
Career After joining the University of California, Davis as an assistant professor in 1980, Carey was promoted to associate professor in 1987 and then to Professor in 1992. From 1989 to 2005, he served as the Principal Investigator for the NIH/NIA Duke-based project, Oldest Old Mortality. Additionally, from 2003 to 2013, he held the position of Program Director for the NIH/NIA Aging in the Wild project. Additionally, he has been a Senior Scholar at the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1996, and Distinguished Professor of Entomology at the University of California since 2014.
Research Carey has conducted research on insect demography, mortality dynamics, insect invasion biology, and biodemography.
Biodemography In the early 1990s, Carey shifted from insect ecology to biodemography, completing a demography-based PhD, teaching insect demography, and authoring a book on biological demography, Applied Demography for Biologists with special emphasis on insects. This 1993 book was the first to apply demographic tools to a nonhuman species, covering standard techniques, and addressing unique demographic problems. A review in the European Journal of Entomology praised its comprehensive coverage, and William J. Cromartie, reviewing for The Quarterly Review of Biology, underscored that, "This book treats demography more completely than any general ecology or population biology volume." He also added, "Carey introduces a range of demographic literature not included in most intermediate and advanced textbooks on ecology and entomology." Carey integrated biology with human demography. He is the lead author of the book Biodemography: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods, with Deborah Roach, published in 2020. This book has covered baseline models, biodemographic applications, and drawn from diverse species' datasets. A review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution lauded him and Roach for delivering an excellent introduction to the concepts and methods that underpin biodemography. Carey also produced a video guidebook on UC Berkeley's Population Sciences website, comprising 175 presentations covering the entire textbook. This resource integrated biology, mathematics, and demography, covering life tables, applied demography, and visualization strategies.
Mortality dynamics/slowing Carey's highly cited paper on "slowing of mortality at older ages," has centered around his discovery that mortality slows at advanced ages. The UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Science acknowledged this as one of the "100 Ways in Which Our College Has Shaped the World." In a 1998 collaborative work, he explored increased old-age survival, investigated extended postreproductive life, and suggested studying death rate correlation and fertility-longevity interactions, noting nongenetic factors in longer human life-spans without explicitly mentioning "Biodemographic Trajectories."
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