Health of Older Minorities

This application seeks funds for 5 years, to continue the current NIH-funded T32 program at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), to support 3 pre-doctoral and 1 post-doctoral trainees per year. The program aims to increase and improve the pool of researchers with relevant expertise to help address challenges raised by the aging of the United States population. Given our strengths in the areas of Hispanic/Latino aging with a multi-disciplinary, population-based perspective, we focus on factors related to health outcomes involving these populations as well as minority groups in general. The post-doctoral fellows and the pre-doctoral students are housed in the Sealy Center on Aging, with which most T32 faculty are affiliated. The pre-doctoral students receive their degree from the School of Public and Population Health, and benefit by interacting with PhD students in other programs, funded by AHRQ and by the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Our faculty have a long history of epidemiological, social and behavioral research on aging. Of relevance to the proposed T32 is that UTMB is currently the home of two large population-based, longitudinal, cohort studies funded by the National Institute on Aging — the Hispanic Established Population for the Epidemiological Study of the Elderly (Hispanic EPESE) and the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS). Our faculty hold multiple investigator-initiated grants, as well as multi-disciplinary research infrastructure grants on aging, including a Pepper Center for Independent Older Adults and a Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR). The 26 faculty members affiliated with the T32 program represent research strengths in multiple disciplines — epidemiology, demography, anthropology, sociology, economics, public health, rehabilitation sciences, geriatrics, and health policy. They also represent five schools and various departments across the campus. Our plan is to build on our strengths and train scientists in social/ behavioral and epidemiological approaches related to minority aging and aging more broadly. Compared to our previous grant, new in our proposed program are: a) expanded group of mentors in the training program, b) a larger recruitment pool for pre-doctoral trainees, and c) one new area of development for trainees: skills for conducting multidisciplinary team-based research.