Hi. My name is Leslie Root and I’m an assistant professor of research at the University of Colorado Boulder. I received a PhD in demography from UC Berkeley in August 2020.
My research interests are wide-ranging. I believe both qualitative and quantitative methods are useful in understanding population processes. My dissertation incorporates interviews, participant observation, and demographic methods to examine the rise in mean age at childbearing and increase in fertility over the course of the Putin era in Russia.
A large portion of my current work is with the Colorado Fertility Project, which aims to use administrative data sources to better measure the effect of contraceptive access on people’s lives, through both fertility and non-fertility pathways. This research has led me to an appreciation of the vast diversity of fertility trajectories experienced by different demographic subgroups, and shaped by different state-level contexts, in the U.S. today; I am also working on an NICHD-funded R03 grant on heterogeneity in the effect of COVID on fertility.
Other topics that have long animated my research and intellectual trajectory include the fertility postponement transition and lowest-low fertility; fertility intentions; parity distributions; voluntary childlessness and popular ethics of childbearing; gender, reproductive labor, neoliberalism, and post-socialism; reproductive justice; and the politics of abortion and contraception. Methodologically, I am a true Berkeley demographer with a deep appreciation for classic demographic methods and innovations in mathematical demography.
Russia and Eurasia remain close to my heart, and I have extensive experience living and working in the Russian regions (Vladivostok, Ulan-Ude, Kazan’, and Taganrog). I am fluent in Russian, learning Ukrainian, and speak somewhat passable Turkish. I also perform with the Denver-area choir Planina: Songs of Eastern Europe.
the leslie matrix 