Tim Dyson is Emeritus Professor of Population Studies. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2001 and has held visiting positions at the Australian National University in Canberra, the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, and the American University of Beirut. In 1997 he was the lead speaker at the Oxford Farming Conference, and in 2015 he delivered the keynote address at the United Nations Commission on Population and Development in New York. Much of his research has involved studying aggregate demographic processes.

Key areas of work have included research on kinship structure and female autonomy, population growth and agricultural production, famine demography, HIV/AIDS, urban growth and urbanization, child mortality trends, criteria for causal inference, climate change, democratization, and the past, present and future population of the Indian subcontinent.

He has published extensively in the field journal Population and Development Review. His books include: Population and Food—Global Trends and Future Prospects, published by Routledge in 1996; Twenty-First Century India (with Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria) published by Oxford University Press in 2005; and Population and Development—The Demographic Transition, published by Zed in 2010. His latest book is A Population History of India, published by Oxford University Press in 2018. His current research involves examining the idea that famines often occur without food availability declines, and assessing how global warming may affect the future demographic trajectory of the world.