Major Trends in the Demography of Aging: Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the NIA P30 Centers | Centers on Demography and Economics of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias)

PAA2025 Annual Meeting April 10-13, Washington, DC

2025 Population Association of America Annual Meeting

Welcome and Introduction (4 minutes)
Jennifer Karas Montez, Chair (Center for Aging and Policy Studies, a consortium among Syracuse University, Cornell University, and University at Albany)

Life expectancy/mortality (8 minutes)
Eileen Crimmins
Center on Biodemography and Population Health, University of Southern California & University of California, Los Angeles

Morbidity/disability (8 minutes)
Scott Lynch
Center for Population Health and Aging, Duke University

Health care (8 minutes)
Will Dow
Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California, Berkeley

Cognition/AD/ADRD (8 minutes)
Jennifer Wolff and Dan Polsky
Hopkins Economics of Alzheimer’s Disease and Services Center, Johns Hopkins University

Caregiving (8 minutes)
Joseph Hotz
Center for Health Aging Behaviors and Longitudinal Investigations, University of Chicago

Social Ties (8 minutes)
Debra Umberson
Center on Aging and Population Sciences, University of Texas, Austin

Climate (8 minutes)
Elizabeth Frankenberg
Carolina Center for Population Aging and Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Questions (15 minutes)

Presenter: Adolfo Cuevas, New York University

In-person in RLP 1.302 E
And via Zoom https://utexas.zoom.us/j/92920894372

Abstract:
Exposure to discrimination represents significant risk factors for illness and disease, particularly affecting racially minoritized groups. These experiences, akin to other psychological and social stressors, trigger physiological responses that disrupt the body’s homeostasis, potentially leading to stress-related diseases. Mounting evidence underscores inflammation as an important pathway in the pathophysiology of these conditions. This presentation offers a brief overview of discrimination’s impact on health, particularly among marginalized racial/ethnic groups. Emphasis is placed on elucidating how discriminatory encounters incite physiological responses, disturbing homeostasis, and precipitating stress-related diseases via inflammatory pathways. Recent research linking discrimination and inflammation will be presented. This talk will highlight limitations in the literature and outline recommendations for future studies to comprehensively examine this association, aiming to fill crucial knowledge gaps.

Bio:
Adolfo G. Cuevas, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU’s School of Global Public Health and Deputy Director of the Center for Anti-racism, Social Justice, & Public Health. As a community psychologist, he employs epidemiological, psychological, and biological approaches to investigate the effects of discrimination on health and health inequities. He uses a wide range of population-level datasets and advanced statistical methods to establish a plausible understanding of how discrimination “get under the skin” to increase the risk of aging-related diseases. Dr. Cuevas’ work has been published in scientific journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature’s International Journal of Obesity, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, and Annals of Internal Medicine and featured in HuffPost and NPR’s Code Switch. He is currently spearheading three NIH-funded project aimed at examining the impact of both neighborhood and interpersonal discrimination on biological dysregulation throughout the life course. For his contributions to research on discrimination and health, Dr. Cuevas was named one of the National Minority Quality Forum’s 40 Under 40 Leaders in Minority Health in 2018 and received the Herbert Weiner Early Career Award by the Society of Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine in 2025. Prior to joining NYU, he was the Gerald R. Gill Assistant Professor of Race, Culture, and Society at Tufts University. He earned his PhD and MS in applied psychology from Portland State University and completed postdoctoral training at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Looking for cohort data collected from large, diverse, nationally representative samples of Americans followed from high school through mid/late life?

This data is ideal for studying the social and biological pathways through which education and other early life factors shape later-life cognition and health. The Education Studies for Healthy Aging (EdSHARe) project has you covered and is offering a workshop at the 2025 Population Association of America Annual Meeting!

The PAA EdSHARe workshop will be held in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, April 10, from 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST in the Monument Room of the Marriott Marquis!
Questions about EdSHARe or the PAA workshop? Please email: [email protected].

In this 90-minute webinar, NIA-funded researchers will describe how social media and new technologies may enhance—or limit—social connectedness and emotional well-being among older adults.

Daily Social Media Use, Social Ties, and Emotional Well-Being in Later Life

Karen L. Fingerman, Ph.D.
Wilson Regents Professor, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences
Director, Texas Aging and Longevity Center
Director of Research, Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) Program Development and Pilot Core
University of Texas at Austin

Home Alone Together: Differential Links between Momentary Contexts and Real-Time Loneliness among Older Adults from Chicago during Versus before the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ellen L. Compernolle, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist, NORC
University of Chicago

Social Connection and Gene Regulation during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Divergent Patterns for Online and In-Person Interaction

Steven W. Cole, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Medicine, Hematology/Oncology
Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences
Director, UCLA Social Genomics Core Laboratory
University of California at Los Angeles

This webinar will be hosted by the Coordinating Center for the Centers on the Demography and Economics of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias.

CAPS Texas Center on Aging and Population Sciences

Presenter: Karen Fingerman

In person in RLP 1.302 E
And via Zoom https://utexas.zoom.us/j/92920894372

Abstract:
Large national studies have documented links between social engagement a better physical, cognitive, and emotional well-being in late life. Yet, the mechanisms underlying these associations remain poorly understood. This talk will describe findings from an in-depth study that tracked older adults with a variety of sensor devices in naturalistic settings as they went about their day. The study focused on the full range of ties older adults encountered in daily life, going beyond close ties to understand whether and how interactions with acquaintances and strangers might enhance the benefits older adults derive from the social world. This talk explores the impact of encounters with close and weak ties and the different functions the two types of ties serve.

Bio:
Dr. Karen Fingerman is the Wilson Regents Professor of Human Ecology, Director of the Texas Aging & Longevity Consortium, and Director of Research for the UT Austin Center on Aging and Population Sciences. She has nearly 200 publications addressing social and emotional aging, including older adults’ intergenerational family ties, ties, the broader social networks, and physical and cognitive functioning across adulthood. She uses a variety of sensors and tracking methods to examine older adults’ activities, sleep, and well-being in a naturalistic setting. She received the Distinguished Mentor in Gerontology Award from the BSS section of GSA in 2020, the Baltes Distinguished Research Award in Psychology of Aging from the American Psychological Association in 2022, and took second place in the Great Blanton Bakeoff in 2024.

The Workshop on Determinants of Adult Mortality, Morbidity, and Healthy Aging in LMICs is co-sponsored by the NIA-supported UC Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging-CEDA (William Dow) and the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health-CBPH (Eileen Crimmins, Teresa Seeman, Jennifer Ailshire and Steve Cole)

This is the 8th annual workshop designed to share leading research methods and findings on comparative patterns and determinants of adult mortality, morbidity, and healthy aging in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). We welcome both LMIC-specific studies as well as comparisons with high-income countries.

The goal is to build a robust evidence base for understanding the drivers of cross-national adult health patterns, especially in populations with unusually high or low adult mortality. The expanded availability of longitudinal HRS-type surveys in LMICs makes this an opportune time to gather a network of researchers using such data to study adult health patterns and determinants, in order to share innovative methods, new results, and ideas for the most promising research agenda going forward.

We invite one-page abstracts of papers to be considered for presentation. Please submit by November 1, 2024 to [email protected].

For inquiries about topical areas, please contact Will Dow [email protected] and Eileen Crimmins [email protected].