The University of Minnesota Demography and Economics of Aging and AD/ADRD Coordinating Center

The National Institute on Aging Demography and Economics Coordinating Center (NIA DECC) will help the NIA P30-funded Demography and Economics of Aging and AD/ADRD (D&E) Centers realize their full potential to generate impactful research, to facilitate new and innovative collaborations, and to broaden the community of aging and AD/ADRD scholars. NIA’s investment in a Coordinating Center is only justified if it increases the efficiency, productivity, and impact of the collective group of D&E Centers beyond what they can accomplish in isolation. We propose an exciting, interactive, and dynamic new vision for what the D&E CC can do for the D&E Centers, for NIA, and for the community of researchers worldwide who will leverage our resources to shape the next generation of research on the demography and economics of aging and AD/ADRD. We will do this by (1) serving as the administrative hub of the D&E Centers; (2) facilitating synergistic collaborations to catalyze impactful aging research; (3) expanding the impact of the D&E Centers’ research through effective dissemination; and (4) coordinating tracking and reporting to reduce redundant effort and increase productivity. The suite of activities we propose leverages the many strengths, assets, expertise, and programming of the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation to coordinate and enhance the activities of the individual D&E Centers; the objective is to make the whole more productive and impactful than the sum of its parts. The NIA DECC will create and support a vibrant nationwide community of aging and AD/ADRD scholars that is better informed, supported, and connected to address urgent aging-related problems. Like the individual D&E Centers and NIA, we are also deeply committed to growing the pool of scientists studying the D&E of aging and AD/ADRD. We will coordinate, organize, and catalyze the individual D&E Centers’ efforts to recruit and support Emerging Scholars. The NIA DECC will be led by an interdisciplinary MPI team that has, for more than a decade, collaborated to successfully develop, implement, grow, and sustain multiple research centers, major research projects, training programs, professional development programs, and initiatives to help early career scholars develop their research agendas and funding portfolios. We envision the NIA DECC as a central hub of innovation, information exchange, and new ideas and collaborations, connecting the D&E Centers to one another, to NIA, to other NIA P30-funded networks (e.g., the Roybal Centers, the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers), to policymakers, and to the public. The proposed activities will increase the productivity of all the D&E Centers and grow and broaden the aging and AD/ADRD research community, supporting the P30 Center Program’s goal to advance aging research in demography, economics, and related interdisciplinary population-based social science areas, including those with a focus on AD/ADRD.