Carolina Center for Population Aging and Health

With this proposal we seek to renew funding for the Carolina Center for Population Aging and Health (CCPAH) which will allow us to build on the productive environment for aging research that we have developed since the Center was founded in 2020. Over the next five years CCPAH will expand its support to faculty at other schools in the region and continue to support researchers at UNC-CH, with the goal of facilitating production of the highest quality science in the demography and economics of aging. CCPAH enhances the pace of ongoing work, fosters the development of new research on a variety of aging-related topics, and mentors a group of emerging scholars seeking to become NIH-funded investigators. As part of the Carolina Population Center (CPC), CCPAH leverages well-developed organizational structures for the purpose of catalyzing aging research. We focus on three themes and four cross-cutting approaches, which in combination reflect the variety of research on aging that is underway or planned for the next five years. Our themes are Aging in Different Contexts, Understanding Links Between Health and Social and Economic Productivity, and Measurement and Methods. Cutting across these three themes we emphasize longitudinal data and life-course perspectives; multi-level approaches for social and environmental context; interventions and natural and policy experiments for evaluation; and race/ethnicity, sex, age, socioeconomic status, and rurality as critical sources of disparities in health, well-being, and social and economic productivity. We propose three cores: Administrative, Program Development, and Communication and Dissemination. In combination these cores support a research ecosystem that combines exposure to state-of-the-art research on aging, mentoring for emerging scientists and access to pilot funds to support project development, and outstanding administrative and technical support. Each core supports each of the themes. Over the course of the grant CCPAH faculty will design primary data collection efforts, continue and begin new analyses of secondary data, as well as data they have collected, and oversee the production and dissemination of data products. These public goods will enrich the data to which researchers around the world have access to advance science on aging.