Emily Harris

Emily Harris works as a senior demographer and focuses on population estimates, demographic trend research, data analysis and visualization and population projections.

Harris’s work involves collaboration with many community partners to provide analysis, information, and concise communication of complex ideas to inform policymakers and local stakeholders of the current and future demographic characteristics of Utah’s population.

Harris built and maintains the models that produce annual state and county population estimates for the Utah Population Committee, where she serves as the technical lead and researcher on methodological innovations. Further, she develops data visualizations and written explanations for long run county population projections. Her research includes publications that define and describe Utah’s changing demographics as well as provide insight into complex data using analytics, manipulation and visualization in R, Stata and Tableau.

Harris earned her B.A. in Sociology from Middle Tennessee State University and her M.S. in Sociology from Purdue University. Prior to her time at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, she was a research analyst at the Center for Research on Young People’s Health and a Statistics instructor at Purdue University.