Eugene Grebenik

Eugene Grebenik (; 20 July 1919 – 14 October 2001), known as "Grebby", was a British civil servant who was a central figure in the development of demography in Britain. He was the first director of the UK's Civil Service College.

Early life and education Grebenik was born in Kyiv a few months after the establishment of the Ukrainian SSR. He was the only son and elder child of Jewish parents Schulim Grebenik (1887–1972), estate agent, and his wife, Lea Helene (née Lopatizkaya; 1894–1985), a qualified lawyer. His birth was not registered with the Soviet government because his mother did not want him to be naturalised and thought that this was mandatory. He had a sister, Renata Rosalie. The family moved to Danzig in 1920, then to Berlin, and finally, after the rise of Adolf Hitler, to England in 1933. Grebenik could speak several European languages but none like a native. All his life he was known as Grebby, because he never liked the association with eugenics born by the name 'Eugene'.

Grebenik worked with David Glass, editor of Population Studies, from its inception in 1947—and continued to be associated with the journal as joint and then sole editor for fifty years. He was promoted to reader in demography at the LSE in 1949. His work with Glass on the 1946 family census, published in two volumes as The Trend and Pattern of Fertility in Great Britain (1954), was a landmark in cohort analysis. In 1954 Grebenik was appointed professor of social studies at the University of Leeds.

In 1970 Grebenik was appointed the first principal of the Civil Service College at Sunningdale. He left the college in 1976 to conduct research at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, working with Abraham Manie Adelstein and John Fox, where he remained until he retired in 1984.

Grebenik was secretary-general of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population from 1963 to 1973. He organised three of the IUSSP's four-yearly general population conferences, including the one held in Belgrade in 1965 in conjunction with the second United Nations world population conference. He was also president of the British Society for Population Studies from 1979 to 1981. Among other honours, In 1997, he was the first recipient of the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg award from the Population Council in New York.

He and Virginia had three children: Michael, Peter and Catherine.