Dilip Chandra Nath (born 28 November 1952) is an Indian statistician and academic administrator. He is a professor emeritus and honorary advisor at Royal Global University (officially The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati). From 2016 to 2022 he was the vice-chancellor of Assam University, Silchar, a central university. Before that he spent nearly three decades on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Gauhati University, where he was professor of statistics.
Nath works mainly in demography, biostatistics and actuarial statistics. His research has dealt with fertility and family planning, birth-interval analysis, population ageing, and population health in India and Bangladesh, and he is known in particular for a long collaboration with the American anthropologist Donna L. Leonetti on the reproductive ecology of the matrilineal Khasi and patrilineal Bengali communities of north-east India.
Early life and education Nath was born on 28 November 1952. He took a Bachelor of Science with honours in statistics in 1972 at Cotton College, then a constituent college of Gauhati University, and a Master of Science in mathematical statistics from the University of Delhi in 1975.
Between 1980 and 1984 he was a full-time research scholar at Banaras Hindu University on a Teacher Fellowship from the University Grants Commission, completing a PhD in statistics in 1984 with a thesis on analytical models for the number of births.
He undertook postdoctoral work twice in the United States: as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in advanced demography in the Department of Sociology at Duke University from 1991 to 1993, and as a visiting scientist in anthropological demography in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington from 1997 to 1998 under an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. He remained an affiliate professor at the University of Washington until 2002.
Academic career Nath began teaching in 1975 as a lecturer in statistics at Arya Vidya Peeth College, Guwahati, where he remained until 1985. He joined the Department of Statistics at Gauhati University as a lecturer in 1985, became a reader in 1988, and was appointed professor of statistics in 1998, a post he held until 2016.
At Gauhati University he headed the Department of Statistics from 2000 to 2003 and again in 2014, served as honorary director of the university's Population Research Centre over the same periods, and was acting academic registrar in 2013–14. He has supervised around thirty doctoral students.
Nath has served on academic and advisory bodies at several Indian universities, including Tripura University, Rajiv Gandhi University, North-Eastern Hill University, Mizoram University, Dibrugarh University and Visva-Bharati University. He was a member of the Programme Advisory Committee in Mathematical Sciences of the Science and Engineering Research Board under the Department of Science and Technology from 2012 to 2018, and a governing body member of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Guwahati.
Vice-chancellorship of Assam University Nath took charge as the sixth vice-chancellor of Assam University, Silchar, on 16 May 2016. On assuming office he said his main objective was to raise the university's standing within Indian higher education.
His five-year term expired in 2021. In May of that year the university's registrar announced that, following a communication from the Ministry of Education issued under the Assam University Act, 1989, Nath would continue in office until a successor was appointed and took charge. He demitted office in January 2022 and was succeeded as vice-chancellor by Rajive Mohan Pant.
He joined The Assam Royal Global University, Guwahati, as professor emeritus in February 2022, and additionally as honorary advisor from 2024.
Research Nath's research spans mathematical demography, biostatistics and actuarial statistics. His early work, much of it with B. N. Bhattacharya, developed parity-dependent probability models for the number of births and methods for estimating fecundability in heterogeneous populations. Working with the sociologist Kenneth Land at Duke University in the 1990s, he applied hazard models and life table techniques to Indian survey data on age at marriage, breastfeeding, postpartum amenorrhoea, birth spacing and child mortality.
From the late 1990s Nath collaborated with Donna L. Leonetti of the University of Washington on a comparative study of the matrilineal Khasi and patrilineal Bengali populations of north-east India. The project examined how kinship organisation shapes reproductive outcomes, finding that the identity of the kin who support a mother — her own relatives or her husband's — differs systematically between the two systems and is associated with differences in child survival and in the timing of women's reproduction.
His later work includes indices for measuring the pace of population ageing in South Asian populations, survey-sampling methods for estimating vaccination coverage and health parameters, and actuarial modelling of claim severity and probability of ultimate ruin in non-life insurance.
Nath has been principal or co-principal investigator on research projects funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has collaborated with the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
Editorial work and professional bodies Nath was chief editor of Demography India, the journal of the Indian Association for the Study of Population, from 2007 to 2011, having earlier served as an editor of the journal from 2005 to 2007. He has also been chief editor of Contributions to Applied and Mathematical Statistics and of the Journal of Empirical Research in Social Science.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and a member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and the International Biometric Society. Within the Indian Association for the Study of Population he served successively as north-east coordinator, joint secretary, executive committee member and, from 2006 to 2012, vice-president.
Selected publications Books
Articles
Awards and honours Teacher Fellowship, University Grants Commission (1980–1984) Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1991–1993) Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (1997–1998) Golden AIM Award for Most Innovative Vice-Chancellor (2020) Lifetime Achievement Award, Bestow Edutrex (2020) Academic Leadership Award, Mc Stem Global Awards (2023) Aryabhata Award for Lifetime Achievement, Association of Researchers and Academicians of India (2024)
References
External links
Faculty profile at The Assam Royal Global University