Dean Spears is an economic demographer, development economist and associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Population Wellbeing Initiative. He is a founding executive director of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.), a non-profit that studies health and wellbeing in rural north India, and holds a PhD in economics from Princeton.

His research covers child health and survival, sanitation, air pollution, climate change and the consequences of falling birth rates. With Michael Geruso he wrote After the Spike, a book on global population decline, and with Diane Coffey he wrote the award-winning Where India Goes.