Centering Aging Populations in the Public Health Agenda

Jinkook Lee is a professor of economics and directs the Program on Global Aging, Health, and Policy at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. Her research focuses on the economics of aging, with interdisciplinary training and expertise in large-scale population surveys. As the Principal Investigator on several NIH-funded grants, she laid the groundwork for studying Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia and their risk factors and impacts in low and middle-income countries. She has developed the country’s first and only population representative dementia study in India and helped developing sister studies in China, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, and Malawi. She provides scientific advice for WHO, OECD, World Bank, and Asia Development Bank and serves on and the editorial boards for several scientific journals. She previously held a professorship at Ohio State University and the Pardee RAND Graduate School.  She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and B.S. from Seoul National University.

Dr. Torres is a social epidemiologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Torres’ current research focuses on the role of policies, families, and community social networks in shaping population health and health inequities, particularly in mid and late-life. Her ongoing research is examining the role of family social connections, caregiving, and household composition changes in shaping late-life health, including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. She approaches her research from a life-course perspective and a social determinants of health framework. Much of her ongoing research employs modern epidemiologic methods that are better equipped than conventional methods at estimating the impact of time-varying exposures in the presence of time-varying confounding. Dr. Torres is also supporting trainees at all levels who are leading research broadly on the social determinants of inequity in health and aging and specifically related to policy impacts on the health of immigrants and their family and community members across the life-course.

Rob Warren, PhD is a sociologist, demographer, population health scholar, and education policy researcher with experience and expertise in the collection, production, and dissemination of large-scale data products for research on health, aging, education, and labor force outcomes through his NIH- and NSF-funded work on High School and Beyond (HSB), the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), the 1940 U.S. Census, and the IPUMS version of the Current Population Surveys (IPUMS-CPS). Dr. Warren is involved in the construction of the new 100% count historical Census data sets for IPUMS, and he has two ongoing NIH-funded projects to link early 20th century U.S. Census data to (1) several modern surveys of older Americans, including the HRS, PSID, and WLS and (2) recent mortality records from the Social Security Administration.

Dr. Wong is a Mexican scholar who received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1987. She served in the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Georgetown University Department of Demography, and as Associate Director of the University of Maryland Population Research Center. She joined UTMB in 2008 to serve as Director of the WHO/PAHO Collaborating Center on Aging and Health. She is also Vice Chair of Research at the UT School of Public and Population Health, Co-Director of the Claude Pepper Older American Independence Center, and Director Ad Interim of the Sealy Center on Aging.

Dr. Wong’s research agenda focuses on the economic consequences of population aging, in particular in Mexico and among immigrant Hispanics in the U.S. She has pioneered the use of cross-national approaches to study health outcomes among international migrants, and has completed recent work on disability and unhealthy lifestyles among elderly in the U.S. and Mexico, socioeconomic gradients of health, poverty and utilization of health services, co-existence of infectious and chronic diseases, and the impact of the social security and health care reform among elderly in Mexico. She serves as Principal Investigator of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), financed by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. The study seeks to locate research on Mexico’s unique health dynamics in broad socioeconomic context, and it includes a national longitudinal survey of multiple purposes among the population of middle and old age. A description of the study and a list of publications related to the MHAS is available at www.MHASweb.org.

Dr. Wong has edited volumes and published in numerous professional journals and makes presentations regularly at national and international conferences. She has served in the editorial boards of the journals Demography, J. of Aging and Health, J. of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and Papeles de Poblacion. She has served the profession including in various national and global committees including the International Outreach Committee of the Population Association of America, a member of review study sections of the National Institutes of Health, and a member of the Board of Directors of both the Population Association of America and the Mexican Society of Demography.

Tara Bahrampour, who was a staff writer at The Washington Post for 19 years, spent the past decade reporting for the Post on aging, generations and demography. She is this year’s recipient of the National Press Foundation’s AARP Award for Excellence in Journalism on Aging, for stories that explored why octogenarians still work, why Americans over 50 do extreme sports and why older trans adults come out.