Lloyd Potter, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Texas State Demographer Distinguished Professorship

Professor, Demography

Director, Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research

Lloyd Potter’s research interests include applied demography, water and energy consumption demographics, transportation, and injury and violence prevention.

Potter has served as director of the Texas Demographic Center—which acts as a focal point for the production, interpretation, and distribution of demographic information for Texas—since 2009 and was appointed Texas State Demographer by the governor in 2010. In addition, Potter is the director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at UTSA.

His research has appeared in refereed academic journals such as Water and Energy Policy, and he has an h-index of 32 with over 3,800 citations to date. His work has been funded by organizations such as the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the National Science Foundation, and the City of San Antonio, receiving more than $4 million since 2013 from these groups and others.

Potter has been involved in numerous committees at UTSA and the surrounding community, including the university’s faculty senate, the research committee for his college, the graduate program evaluation committee, and his departmental faculty review committee. He is also a board member and former chair of Community Information Now (CI: Now), a nonprofit organization that provides tools, analysis, and training to inform decisions to improve Texas communities.       

Among his past awards, Potter was a recipient of TxDOT’s Texas Road Hand Award in 2022, which honors those who drive the state forward in the area of transportation. He also received the Mark G. Yudof Endowed Professorship in 2019 and the Peter Flawn Professorship in 2017.

Potter earned a Ph.D. in sociology with a specialization in demography from The University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from Emory University, a Master of Science in education from the University of Houston–Clear Lake, and a Bachelor of Science in sociology from Texas A&M University.