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The numbers man

Sonia Chopra

Shripad Tuljapurkar says his adrenaline pumps whenever he discusses his work. He is an expert on aging population but while the subject may seem dreary to many, he loves to discuss his expertise.

The expansion of the human life span may be the most significant change in human life during the 20th century, he points out. In 1900, the average American could expect to live just 47 years. Today, the average American lives 75 years.

The aging of the American population has widespread implications for the US society, and issues related to the older Americans are some of the hotly contested matters in the current presidential election.

Tuljapurkar's four-year-old firm, Mountain View Research located at Los Altos in the heart of Silicon Valley, develops analytical tools and educational products to help policy-makers, organizations and individuals to adapt to the consequences of this unprecedented change.

"Sales and marketing people do the same kind of research with numbers," he says. "They focus on where people live and how old they are, so they can sell their products. They try to make it look like fun but its not."

Tuljapurkar insists he is not a "magical predictor" who throws numbers at researchers and policy analysts.

"In fact, we are different from the rest of the scientists. Our main skill is that if we are given, say, a population like the US, we make a probability forecast," says Tuljapurkar, a member of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at Berkeley.

"We will give you a set of odds that show an approximate picture of what will happen down the road in 30 to 40 years and you have to make an informed decision. It is a little like gambling."

''The elderly population is suddenly very important because the birth rate is going down and the life spans are very high in the US as opposed to a country like India where babies are still being produced everyday and the life spans are much shorter," adds Tuljapurkar.

The data about the aging population are needed by government agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and by corporations and by policy analysts.

"Our current projects focus on how rapidly the population will age around the globe and how we need to develop effective tools to assess individual mortality risks," Tuljapurkar continues.

Tuljapurkar has three other partners: Mike Anderson, with a Ph.D in demography and an MA in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, has held a post-doctoral appointment at Berkeley; Carl Boe, who has a Ph D from the University of California at Berkeley and has held post-doctoral appointments at Stanford and at the University of California; and Nan Li who has a Ph D from China's Xi'an Jaitong University. His wife, Shubha, is a technical adviser.

Currently MVR is not making a profit but Tuljapurkar hopes to change that.

"Right now, we are breaking even but we want to definitely generate money, which we will reinvest in more research," Tuljapurkar, who is a visiting professor at Stanford, continues.

His expertise and services are sought by institutions across America. He is a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute and serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals and on review panels for scientific agencies.

There have been plenty of honors too. In 1990, he was elected Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences. In 1996, he received the Mindel Sheps award from the Population Association of America and in 1998, he received the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship.

Tuljapurkar was born in Calcutta but lived in cities across India because his father was in the army. He completed his schooling at St Columbus, New Delhi and earned a bachelor's degree from Wadia College, Pune. It was there he met Shubha, after they won scholarships in The National Science Talent contest. Today, the couple has one daughter, Anjali, 19, a sophomore at Brown majoring in economics.

In 1971, Tuljapurkar graduated at the top of his master's class in physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Soon he married Shubha who worked at Tata Consulting as a computer specialist. He worked for a year at DCM.

"I decided I liked the science aspect of it better than I liked the business stuff," Tuljapurkar recalls. "Naturally, I was restless."

The restlessness led him to Portland State University in Oregon where he earned a doctorate in environmental science/physics.

"At that point, I started to get interested in ecology, pollution and biology," says Tuljapurkar, who got a post-doctoral appointment at Harvard University where he taught biology and did research in pollution genetics for three years till 1979.

One day while idling through a newspaper, he read an advertisement for a faculty position at Portland University in the Environmental Science/Physics program.

The opportunity was irresistible. Tuljapurkar went back to Portland to teach for the next 11 years.

But when the recession hit Portland "pretty bad" he decided to move on in early 1990. He had received award from the National Institute of Health, and it was easy for him to get a job at Berkeley and then at Stanford, where he taught and did research on population demographics.

Despite the chores of running a start-up and trying to make it profitable, Tuljapurkar makes time for writing.

He is at work on his third book.

"I want to write about social security," he says. "It is a very hot topic and I hear politicians saying all these things that are needed to fix it and I know that they have no clue about it, let alone fixing it."

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