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Entries are open for The Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize for Research in Demography and Population Health. The prize commemorates the talented demographer and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science’s DPhil student Julia Media Knox who tragically passed away in November 2023.
The annual prize aims to encourage scholarship from DPhil students across all departments, divisions and colleges at the University of Oxford. The submitted essay can be on any topic related to demography and population health, broadly defined, but preference will be given to those working in Julia’s research area of genetics/genomics, inclusivity and public health.
Entries are open to DPhil students across the University of Oxford until Monday 9 November and should be submitted via the LCDS Office mailbox. We welcome entrants to nominate either themselves or somebody else. We especially encourage nominations from departmental or college supervisors on behalf of their students. The winner will receive a monetary prize of £1,000, with presentation of the award to take place at an upcoming event.
Julia Mead Knox
The prize was established in honour of Julia Mead Knox. Julia was a DPhil student at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Green Templeton College, where she studied the diversity of participants in genomic research and public health.
Julia received her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Vermont, and her master’s degree in public health from the University of New England. She loved books and everything about them. Not only a reader, Julia was a born writer with a deep love of and respect for words. She had a treasured collection of pens from many places. She loved the natural world, its beauty, the all of it, and was full of wonder.
Julia was fiercely intelligent, curious, forthright and with a great wit. Committed to social justice, she was truly kind and thoughtful, compassionate, and always sought the good. She was beloved. Julia tragically died on 7 November 2023, following complications arising from Covid-19.
Prize rules
The competition is open annually to anyone currently enrolled in postgraduate research at the University of Oxford. They can be from any department, although they should not have defended their thesis earlier than in the January of the calendar year of the award. The winner’s student status verification will be requested from their academic supervisor or relevant Graduate Studies Team.
Submissions should include a title and an abstract (of up to 250 words), and may be of variable length, but they should be no longer than 10,000 words (inclusive of all tables, figures and references). Typically, the work is a chapter or article from their thesis and may be co-authored, but we require that the entrant is the primary author and that the paper contains an author contribution statement. We will not accept summaries of work or a thesis, but rather only a substantive research article or chapter.
Prize donations
If you would like to donate to The Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize for Research in Demography and Population Health, you can do so via the fundraising link. If you prefer another payment method, please contact Martha Ground at the University of Oxford’s Development Office who can help process your donation and provide more information about Americans for Oxford if required.
If you prefer another payment method, please contact Martha Ground at the University of Oxford’s Development and Alumni Engagement team, who can help process your donation and provide further information about Americans for Oxford if required.
Your support will help us encourage scholarship in demography and population health across the University of Oxford to leave a lasting legacy for an extremely talented demographer, Julia Mead Knox.
The Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize 2025
The 2025 Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize, in its second year, attracted submissions from across the University, including Oxford Population Health, Social Policy, Anthropology and Sociology, with the jury recognised four researchers for the exceptional quality of their work.
The 2025 Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize was jointly awarded to Édith Darin for “Leveraging High-Frequency Digital Data to Analyze Forced Displacement Dynamics: A Case Study from the Gaza Strip” and Jiani Yan for “Revisiting the social determinants of health with explainable AI: a cross-country perspective.” Their research demonstrated the breadth of contemporary demographic science, from using novel digital data to understand forced displacement during humanitarian crises to applying machine learning and explainable AI to investigate health and mortality.
Runner-up prizes were awarded to Jasmin Abdel Ghany for “Temperature and Sex Ratios at Birth”, exploring the relationship between climate, prenatal mortality and sex ratios at birth, and Antonino Polizzi for “Why is life expectancy in England and Wales falling behind? A cause-of-death decomposition approach”, examining the factors contributing to England and Wales's widening life-expectancy gap with other high-income countries.
Read more about the Julia Mead Knox Memorial Prize 2025 winners and their research.
