Komlos was born in 1944 in Budapest in Hungary during the Holocaust.[3] After becoming refugees during the 1956 revolution, his family fled to the United States where Komlos finally grew up in Chicago.[3][4]
Career
Komlos received a PhD in history in 1978 and a second PhD in economics in 1990 from the University of Chicago.[1][5] After inspired by Robert Fogel to work on the history of human height,[2] Komlos devoted most of his academic career developing and expanding the research agenda that became known as Anthropometric history,[2][6][7] the study of the effect of economic development on human biology as indicated by the physical stature or the obesity rate prevalence of a population.[8][4][9][10]
Komlos was a fellow at the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1984 to 1986. He worked as a professor of economics and of economic history at the University of Munich for eighteen years before his retirement.[5][1]
In 2003, Komlos founded Economics and Human Biology, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on biological economics, economics in the context of human biology and health.[2][5][1] In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Cliometric Society.[11]
^ abBilger, Burkhard (2004-03-28). "The Height Gap". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2022-12-26. Fogel, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993, is the man most responsible for Komlos's interest in height.
^Komlos, John (1989). Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History. Princeton University Press. pp. 3–20.
