Melinda Mills is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Nuffield Professor of Demography. Her main research areas are combining a social science and genetic approach to the study of behavioural outcomes, with a focus on reproduction (fertility), chronotype, nonstandard, precarious employment and assortative mating. She joined the University of Oxford in 2014 and was previously at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2006-2014), Free University Amsterdam (2002-2005) and Bielefeld University, Germany (2000-2002). She holds a PhD in Demography (Groningen) and a Master and Bachelor of Arts in Sociology (University of Alberta, Canada). As of 2022, she also holds a part-time position at the Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance (University of Groningen) and Department of Genetics (University Medical Centre Groningen). 

Since 2022, she has been one of three Special Advisor, European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni and was on the High-level Advisory Group on post-COVID economic and social challenges, European Commissioner for the Economy. During COVID, she served as a scientific adviser on the UK’s Government Office of Science SAGE (Science Advisory Group for Emergencies), producing rapid evidence during COVID and the Royal Society SET-C, Science Emergency Technology – COVID-19 advisory group. Mills is also a member of the Scientific Committee and Ethics Committee of Our Future Health, the UK’s new 5 million person data collection project and Member, ODISSEI Advisory Board. She was on the Executive Council of the UKRI/ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and the Supervisory Board (Raad van Toezicht) of the Dutch National Science Council (NWO).

Mills has been awarded over 25 Million in grants for interdisciplinary work at the intersection of demography, genetics and behavioural sciences. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, the ERC Advanced Grant CHRONO and the ERC Proof of Concept Grant and social business enterprise DNA4Science. She was the PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant SOCIOGENOME and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods SOCGEN project as well as the Editor in Chief of the European Sociological Review and International Sociology. 

Mills has published 7 books and over 100 articles in the highest academic journals across multiple scientific disciplines including Nature Genetics, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Annual Review of Sociology, JAMA Psychiatry, Journal of Marriage and Family and Social Forces. Her books on globalization, uncertainty and life course have garnered considerable citations, as has her work on fertility and reproductive behaviour. She has written 2 statistical textbooks, Introducing Survival and Event History Analysis (in R) (2011) and An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis (MIT, 2020). Mills has supervised over 20 PhD students, 50 Master students and around 15 postdoctoral researchers.