Demographer and sociologist Alberto Palloni is Samuel H. Preston Professor of Population at the Center for Demography and Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously he was Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Prior to that, he was H. Edwin Young Professor of International Studies and Sociology, also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a Ph.D., in sociology from the University of Washington and a joint B.A./B.S. from the Catholic University of Chile.

Dr. Palloni is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a National Institutes of Health Merit Scholar, and a past president of the Population Association of America (2006). He is also a past fellow of the Guggenheim and Ford foundations, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Center for Mathematical Statistics-CIENES at the Organization of American States.

The author of more than 100 journal articles, publications, and scientific reports, his current research investigates the relationship between early health status and poverty and inequality in the United States; determinants of health and mortality disparities among ethnic groups in the United States; families and households in Africa and Latin America; aging and mortality in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the application of mathematical and statistical models to the study of health and mortality determinants, social stratification, and the spread of disease. He is particularly well-known for his role in describing the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS on family structure in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. He continues to teach on a wide range of topics from sociology and population/development to statistics and models of morbidity and mortality.