Samir KC is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which he joined in 2005 and where he led the Multidimensional Demographic Modelling Research Group from 2021 to 2023. He leads the modelling of the global population and human capital projections that form the human core of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, the scenario framework used across climate and sustainability research. He is a founding member of and Professor at the Asian Demographic Research Institute at Shanghai University, and CEO of the Population and Statistics Research Hub, which he founded in Nepal in 2024.

His research applies multidimensional, multistate population models to human capital formation in education and health, urbanization, and vulnerability to natural disasters. He is the creator of PopSyM, an open framework connecting demographic projection to the systems built around people — education, labour, health, housing, infrastructure, food, water and energy — so that countries can answer their own planning questions. He has applied it with government statistical offices, including Nepal’s official projection to ward level and national systems for Mozambique, Moldova and Turkmenistan, each designed to be run by the country rather than the consultant.

He has published in Science, PNAS and Global Environmental Change, and received his PhD from the University of Groningen in 2009.