William Brass (demographer)

William "Bill" Brass, CBE, FBA (5 September 1921 – 11 November 1999) was a Scottish demographer. He developed indirect methods for estimating mortality and fertility in populations with inaccurate or incomplete data, often dubbed "Brass methods" after him.

Brass was born in Edinburgh, where he went to school at the Royal High School and earned a Master's degree in mathematics and natural philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in 1947; during the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy Scientific Service.

Brass's career as a demographer began in 1948 when he worked as a statistician, then as deputy director, for the East African Statistical Department in Nairobi, which collected and analysed data on Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. During his time there, the department conducted the first comprehensive census in East Africa, and Brass designed and analysed the East African Medical Survey.

From 1955 to 1964 he was a lecturer in statistics at the University of Aberdeen; he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1963. He spent a sabbatical year at Princeton University, where he worked with Ansley J. Coale and others at the Office of Population Research on methods for overcoming the unsatisfactory demographic data for Africa, leading to The Demography of Tropical Africa, published in 1968.

From 1965 until retiring in 1988, he was Reader in Medical Demography and then Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; the first demographer there, he established the Centre for Population Studies, established a master's course in medical demography and taught many of its courses, headed the Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology from 1977 to 1981 and was chairman of the division from 1981 to 1985.

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