Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor and demographer who mined arcane census data to inform urban planning decisions, court rulings on racial desegregation and news coverage that identified emerging population trends, died on April 10 in Washington. He was 79.

The cause was a heart attack he suffered while attending the annual Population Association of America meeting at the Marriott Marquis hotel, his wife, Fredrica Beveridge, said.

Dr. Beveridge, who lived in Bronxville, N.Y., was a professor emeritus of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he served as chairman of the sociology department from 2006 to 2018. He also directed the university’s Applied Social Research program and helped establish its Institute for Demographic Research.

In 1999, he and the software engineer Ahmed Lacevic founded a data-driven academic research group called Social Explorer. Eight years later, they turned that think tank into a company that uses interactive maps and other online tools to translate raw statistics into relevant population projections, offering guidance to public policymakers, nonprofit institutions, scholars, journalists and businesses.

Dr. Beveridge and his teams at City University and at Social Explorer worked with reporters and editors from The New York Times, beginning in 1993, to explore social trends and the changing demographic profile of New York and the nation.

That collaboration yielded a number of insights, most notably that the median income of Black households in Queens, the city’s quintessential middle-class borough, had surpassed that of white New Yorkers there; that income gaps among the city’s residents exceeded those in some undeveloped countries; that the historic phenomenon of white flight had not only slowed, but reversed; and that Venezuelans accounted for the largest number of new immigrants in New York.

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