Hal Caswell is a mathematical biologist and demographer.  He received his Ph.D. in zoology from Michigan State University. After a long stay as Senior Scientist in Biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he moved to the University of Amsterdam as Professor of Mathematical Demography and Ecology.  He studies the demography of plants, animals, and humans with equal enthusiasm. He has an inordinate fondness for matrices. Hal's research interests include stochasticity, heterogeneity, evolutionary demography, sensitivity analysis, and health demography.  He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix Population Models (2001), Applied Mathematical Demography (2005; third edition, with Nathan Keyfitz), and Sensitivity Analysis: Matrix Methods in Demography and Ecology (2019). 

His main current research focus is on the formal demography of kinship, developing a new analytical framework that greatly expands the ability to explore the factors determining kinship networks