Peter Davis (sociologist)

Peter Davis (BA S'ton, MSc Lond, PhD) is a sociologist and the husband of former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Davis, born in England in 1947, spent his childhood in Tanzania where his father worked for a mining-company. His father was born in China and his mother in India, but a great-great-grandfather had grown up in New Zealand. Davis gained a master's degree in sociology and statistics at the London School of Economics. He moved to New Zealand in 1970 to work at the University of Canterbury and completed a PhD at the University of Auckland.

He met Clark – then a political-science lecturer at Auckland – in 1977 and they married shortly after she first won election to Parliament in the 1981 general election.

Davis specialises in medical sociology, and he currently works as the Director of the Social Statistics Research Group and Professor of Sociology at the University of Auckland, with part-time appointments in the School of Population Health and the Department of Statistics, also at the University of Auckland. Previously he served as Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago's Christchurch School of Medicine.

He has previously served on the Auckland Area Health Board, and was a representative in 1989 when his wife (Health Minister at the time) suspended that body. Davis has achieved international recognition in his field, having worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization.