Congratulations to Namkee Choi of the Texas Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) who was selected by the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) award committee as the 2021 recipient of the Maxwell Pollack Award!
The Maxwell A. Pollack Award for Contributions to Health Aging recognizes an individual whose research, scholarship or practice has generated new or improved policies or practices related to healthy aging. The work of the awardee, who is typically at the mid or later stage of his/her career, must be particularly noteworthy for how it bridges the worlds of research, policy, and practice.
The Pollack Award follows the expressed wishes of Maxwell Pollack that the awardee be recognized for his/her “outstanding contribution to increasing the human healthy life span.” The award is open to professionals across all substantive areas of basic and applied research, practice or policy in aging. A key criterion is the translation of knowledge into practice or policy that extends, improves or exemplifies the healthy life span. The individual should be visionary in his/her approach to meeting current and critical needs of an older population.
Dr. Choi is Louis and Ann Wolens Centennial Chair in Gerontology in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. Choi’s current research focuses on depression in late life and the development and evaluation of effective psychosocial interventions for depressive symptoms among both community-dwelling and institutionalized older adults.