Martha Farnsworth Riche, director of the U.S. Census Bureau and a former Ithaca resident, will give a public lecture at Cornell on Monday, April 21, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Her lecture is titled "What Demographic Data Tell Us About the American Family: Its Present and Future" and is presented as part of the Family Values Lecture Series of the Cornell Women's Studies Program.

Riche was an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics before becoming a founding editor of the Ithaca-based journal American Demographics in 1978. At the nation's first magazine devoted to interpreting demographic and economic data for corporate and public executives, she became an authority on the evolving public and private use of data.

In 1991 Riche became director of policy studies for the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau, where she worked to strengthen ties among professional statisticians, statisticians in academia and federal policy makers. She became director of the Census Bureau in 1994.

Riche holds bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Michigan and a doctoral degree in literature and linguistics from Georgetown University. She has authored hundreds of scholarly articles and is a frequent public speaker.

"We are pleased and honored that Martha Farnsworth Riche has agreed to speak in the Women's Studies Family Values Lecture Series on April 21," said Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History. "No one is better qualified than she to discuss the changing demography of the American family and to suggest what current demographic trends might portend for the future. We anticipate that her talk will be of interest to a large number of Cornellians in many fields, since she will touch on topics that directly affect all Americans, of whatever age or background."

Riche's lecture at Cornell is cosponsored by the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center.