Biography
Ronald Skeldon is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Sussex and Professor of Human Geography in the Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He lives in Nairn, Scotland. After taking a B.Sc. (Hons) in Geography at the University of Glasgow in 1967, he completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, with a dissertation on Migration in a Peasant Society: the Example of Cuzco, Peru. He became a Research Fellow at the New Guinea Research Unit of the Australian National University, later the Papua New Guinea Institute for Applied Social and Economic Research, in Port Moresby and Goroka, 1974-77. He then joined the United Nations, initially as a census adviser in Papua New Guinea, 1977-79, and later as a population expert based in Bangkok, 1979-82. In 1982, he joined the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, where he remained until 1996, leaving as a Professor of Geography. After four years as an independent consultant based in Bangkok working mainly for international organizations, he joined the University of Sussex in October 2000.
His other activities post 2000, have included a secondment to the Department for International Development (DfID) as a Senior Research Fellow and acting as a consultant to many international organizations, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Population Division. the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre in Hong Kong and, and the Social Science Research Council of New York. He continues to work as an occasional consultant to the International Centre for Migration and Policy Development (ICMPD) in Azerbaijan and Georgia and the Joint Research Centre of the EU in Brussels.