2017 Conference Leadership Biographies
Jacqueline L. Angel, PH.D., Principal Investigator, is Professor of Public Affairs and Sociology and a Faculty Affiliate at the Population Research Center and Lyndon B. Johnson School Center for Health and Social Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines the longitudinal health and long-term care needs of older Mexican Americans. She is Principal Investigator of the NIA Conference Series on Aging in the Americas: U.S. and Mexico. Dr. Angel is author/coauthor/co-editor of 80 journal articles, 30 book chapters, and 11 books. Some of her recent publications include: Family, Intergenerational and Post Traditional Society and Latinos in an Aging World (with Ronald J. Angel), Challenges of Latino Aging in the Americas (William Vega, Kyriakos S. Markides, and Fernando Torres-Gil), and Handbook of the Sociology of Aging (Rick Settersten). Dr. Angel is a Fellow of the Behavioral and Social Sciences section of The Gerontological Society of America.
William A. Vega, PH.D., 2017 Conference Organizer & Co-Investigator, is a provost professor at USC with appointments in social work, preventive medicine, psychiatry, family medicine, psychology and gerontology. He is the Cleofas and Victor Ramirez Professor of Practice, Policy, Research and Advocacy for the Latino Population at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Vega is also the executive director of the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging. Before joining USC, he was director of the Luskin Center for Innovation and an associate provost at UCLA. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Vega has conducted community and clinical research projects on health, mental health and substance abuse throughout the United States and Latin America and been funded by multiple public and private sources. He has published more than 200 articles and chapters, in addition to several books. Vega is currently ranked by Research Gate in the top 2 percent of authors in overall research impact. He is the recipient of many awards including the Award of Excellence in Research by a Senior Scientist from the National Hispanic Science Network, and the Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association.
Kyriakos S. Markides, PH.D., Co-Investigator, is currently the Annie and John Gnitzinger Distinguished Professor of Aging and Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Markides is the Editor of the Journal of Aging and Health, which he founded in 1989. He is the author or co-author of over 370 publications most of which are on aging and health issues in the Mexican American population as well as minority aging issues in general. His research has been funded continuously by the National Institutes of Health since 1980. He is currently Principal Investigator of the Hispanic EPESE (Established Population for the Epidemiological Study of the Elderly), a longitudinal study of the health of older Mexican Americans from the five Southwestern states. Dr. Markides is credited with coining the term ‘Hispanic Epidemiological Paradox’ (with J. Coreil) which is currently the leading theme in Hispanic health. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has listed Dr. Markides among the most highly cited social scientists in the world. He has been honored with several awards including the Distinguished Mentorship Award and the Robert W. Kleemeier Award from the Gerontological Society of America.
Fernando M. Torres-Gil, PH.D., Co-Investigator, has a multifaceted career that spans the academic, professional, and policy arenas. He is a Professor of Social Welfare and Public Policy at UCLA, Director of the UCLA Center for Policy Research on Aging and an Adjunct Professor of Gerontology at USC. He also has served as Acting Dean and Associate Dean at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, and most recently Chair of the Social Welfare Department. He has written six books and over l00 publications. His academic contributions have earned him membership in the prestigious Academies of Public Administration, Gerontology and Social Insurance. He also has an impressive portfolio of public service and national and international recognition. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton as the first-ever U.S. Assistant Secretary on Aging. In addition, Torres-Gil has provided important leadership in philanthropy and non-profit organizations including serving as a former board member for AARP.
Terrence D. Hill, PH.D., Poster Session Presider and Organizer, considers the central aim of his research to be to describe and explain the social inequality in misery and human suffering. He addresses this aim by conducting original theoretical and empirical research on the social distribution of health, health-relevant behavior, and mortality risk. Hill’s research draws from Sociology, Social Psychology, Medical Sociology, and Social Epidemiology to frame health as an expression or outcome of social and cultural forces, including religion, neighborhood context, social relationships, socioeconomic status, gender, race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Hill’s publications appear in a range of journals like the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, The Journals of Gerontology, The Gerontologist, American Journal of Public Health, Labour Economics, and Social Work. He has also published chapters in the Handbook of Sociology of Aging, Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, and Handbook of Religion and Society.
Speaker and Discussant Biographies
Jennifer A. Ailshire, PH.D. is an Assistant Professor of Gerontology, Sociology, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on the role of social and physical environmental factors in maintaining health and promoting healthy aging. She was the PI on a NIA-funded project to create a contextual data resource for users of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). This data resource will allow HRS users to examine health and aging of the population in the context of the social, economic, physical, and health care environments in which older adults live.
±Margarita Alegría, PH.D. is the Chief of the Disparities Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Alegría is currently the PI of four National Institutes of Health-funded research studies: International Latino Research Partnership; Effects of Social Context, Culture and Minority Status on Depression and Anxiety; Building Community Capacity for Disability Prevention for Minority Elders; and Mechanisms Underlying Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Mental Disorders. She is also the co-PI of a William T. Grant Foundation project, titled Understanding the Experience of Majority and Minority Status through Photovoice. Dr. Alegría has published over 200 papers, editorials, intervention training manuals, and several book chapters. As an acknowledgment of her contributions, she has been widely recognized and cited. Her many awards include the Health Disparities Innovation Award from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, 2008; the Carl Taube Award from the American Public Health Association, 2008; the Simon Bolivar Award from the American Psychiatric Association, 2009 and the Award of Excellence from the National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse, 2011. In October 2011, she was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine.
Hortensia Amaro, PH.D. is the Associate Vice Provost for Community Research Initiatives at USC and the Dean’s Professor of Social Work and Preventive Medicine at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. In her career, Amaro has dramatically advanced the understanding of substance abuse disorder treatment, HIV prevention and other urgent public health challenges through a distinguished career that has spanned scholarly research, translation of science to practice, top-level policy consultation and service on four Institute of Medicine committees. She has authored more than 130 scholarly publications, many widely-cited, and she has made landmark contributions to improving behavioral health care in community-based organizations by launching addiction treatment programs that have helped thousands of families and informing practice in agencies around the world. Before joining USC in 2012, Amaro was with Northeastern University for 10 years, serving as dean, as well as distinguished professor of health sciences and counseling psychology, of the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, and as director of the university’s Institute on Urban Health Research. For 18 years prior to that, she was a professor at Boston University. In recognition of the impact of her scholarship, she was elected into the Institute of Medicine in 2010.
Guilherme Luiz Guimaraes Borges, SC.D. is a Psychologist with a doctoral affiliation at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and postdoctoral affiliation at Harvard Medical School. A senior researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatria (Mexico), he has mentored 41 students and published 340 articles and chapters. His areas of expertise are alcohol and drugs and how they related to injuries and suicide, and the role of immigration. Guilherme served as a member of the DSM-5 and is a member of WHO Reference Group on Alcohol and Drug Use Epidemiology. He has received several awards, including the “Jellinek Memorial Fund Award” (Epidemiology, 2015).
Tyson Brown, PH.D. is an Assistant Professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research at Duke University. His research examines how and why racial/ethnic stratification and other axes of inequality combine to shape health and wealth across the life course. This research interest is expressed in three foci: 1) using multidimensional approaches to stratification to investigate the intersecting consequences of social factors on health and wealth, 2) examining whether inequality increases or decreases over the life course, and 3) determining the extent to which structural and psychosocial mechanisms underlie within- and between-group differences in health.
Alice Cepeda, PH.D. is currently an Associate Professor in the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her work has focused on the social epidemiology of drug use and the related health risk behaviors that disproportionately affect urban Mexican-origin minority populations, including violence, HIV/STI infection risks and mental health conditions. Her research has also highlighted the unique gendered experiences encountered by females within this cultural context. She is currently the PI of a NIH/NIDA supported study examining the long-term health consequences of drug use and intimate partner violence on Mexican American females who were associated with male gang members as adolescents. Additionally, she recently completed a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Exploration-funded feasibility study of an HIV intervention using projection mapping technology among active crack users in Mexico City.
±Eileen Crimmins, PH.D. is the AARP Chair in Gerontology, and University Professor at the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. She directs the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health, the NIA sponsored Biomarker Network, and the Multidisciplinary Research in Gerontology Training Program at USC. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for research from the Gerontological Society of America. Crimmins is a demographer whose work focuses on health and aging. Crimmins pioneered the development and modeling of the concept of healthy life expectancy to examine the interaction of trends in life expectancy and population health. Her work has clarified improvements in life expectancy can be linked to increases in the prevalence of major diseases and disability in the population. She has also worked to promote the incorporation of valid and reliable biological data in population surveys in a number of countries.
Karl Eschbach, PH.D. is a sociologist and demographer. He came to UTMB-Galveston in 2001. Eschbach’s research has focused on racial and ethnic disparities, with an emphasis on understanding geographic variation in health and health care outcomes. He has worked with Kokos S. Markides’ Mexican American EPESE throughout his time at UTMB, and created a contextually-linked file for EPESE subjects as his first contribution to the project. In 2016 he retired to the Big Island of Hawai`i, and is now an adjunct professor in Preventive Medicine and Community Health at UTMB. He continues to work on a number of MA EPESE projects.
*David Flores, M.P.H., PH.D. is a research scientist at The University of Texas Medical Branch and has conducted research that focuses on dementia, capacity, elder substance use, and elder mistreatment. He works to understand issues effecting vulnerable, hidden populations of elder adults in the community. He has presented his research locally, nationally, and internationally on geriatric syndromes, minority health, and the influence of culture on aging. Flores’ experiences have taught him the importance of appropriate research planning, working in the community, cooperation and effective methods of communication with community gate keepers. In summary, his research and work are a testimony to the dedication, devotion and love he has for the aging community and for the people he serves as a researcher. Flores looks forward to the opportunity to share this passion with fellow researchers in the field of aging.
*Marc A. Garcia, PH.D. is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sealy Center on Aging at The University of Texas Medical Branch. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His research centers broadly on health disparities across the life course. Specifically, he is interested in how race/ethnicity, nativity, gender, and social economic factors shape physical health, cognitive functioning, and mortality outcomes of aging minority and immigrant groups in the United States.
Zach Gassoumis, PH.D. is a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. His research focuses on securing a basic quality of life for older adults, specifically within the areas of elder abuse, economic security, and the provision of health, social, and protective services. Much of his research involves an application of quantitative methodologies to large, population-based datasets. Along with his colleagues in the Secure Old Age lab, Dr. Gassoumis has identified the value added when the most severe cases of abuse and neglect are presented to an elder abuse multidisciplinary team, the elder abuse forensic center. Dr. Gassoumis’ research on economic security has looked primarily at economic disparities between racial/ethnic and immigrant groups, specifically the intersection between immigration/naturalization and lifespan income and wealth. Funding for Dr. Gassoumis’ research projects has come from sources including federal (National Institute of Justice, Administration on Community Living, National Institute on Aging), state (California Department of Public Health, California Department of Social Services), foundation (Ford Foundation, the Archstone Foundation, The SCAN Foundation), and other non-profit entities (AARP).
Hector M. González, PH.D. is an Associate Professor and Director of the SOL-INCA Project at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Neuroscience. He is a licensed clinical neuropsychologist with clinical research training and experiences in Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers. Dr. González was a clinical research fellow and later co-investigator of the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA), which is a landmark dementia study among Latinos. He served as Principal Investigator of the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (SOL), Neurocognitive Reading Center, which is the largest and most in-depth study of Latino neurocognitive health to-date. Dr. González’ research focuses on Latino health in general, with emphases in body systems associated with brain aging, decline, and neurocognitive disorders (i.e., MCI/ADRD).
Mariana González Lara, M.S. has an undergraduate degree in nutrition from Autonomus University of Hidalgo, Mexico, and a Master in Science focused on Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. For the past four years, she has been participating in various research projects as an Assistant Researcher at the National Institute of Geriatrics in Mexico (INGer), mainly focusing on body composition and diet of older adults. She has also collaborated with researchers at INGer for publications. Lara currently work as a research assistant at INGer.
±Roberto Ham-Chande, PH.D., received his Doctorate in Demography from the Université de Paris X – Nanterre with highest honors. Former positions include Actuary for the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) and for the Institute of Social Security for Public Employees (ISSSTE); Chairman of the Department of Population and Urban Studies of El Colegio de México. Ham- Chande currently serves as a full professor of the Department of Population Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. He received the National Award on Demography 2009 from the Presidency of Mexico.
Ladson Hinton, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at UC Davis, is a geriatric psychiatrist, clinical and services researcher, and social scientist. Over the past two decades, he has conducted interdisciplinary research to better understand the cultural and social dimensions of family caregiving for older adults with dementia and late life depression. He has applied this knowledge to develop innovative and culturally-appropriate interventions to advance care for underserved populations in the US and Vietnam. Dr. Hinton directs the Latino Aging Research Resource Center, one of seven NIA-funded Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research and the Outreach and Recruitment Core for the Alzheimer’s Disease Center. He was a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine ad hoc Committee on Family Caregiving for Older Adults whose report – Families Caring for an Aging America – was published in 2016. He co-directs the newly established Family Caregiving Institute in the UC Davis School of Nursing.
Sue Levkoff, S.M., M.S.W., SC.D. is the SmartState Endowed Chair in Community and Social Support for SmartHOME and Professor in the College of Social Work at the University of South Carolina. Trained in public health and social work, Dr. Levkoff is a social gerontologist who focuses on the reduction of health disparities for older populations through a combination of a range of information and related communication technologies to reduce disparities. Dr. Levkoff conducts intervention research to test different mechanisms to enable “aging in place.” She uses a range of research methods, often conducting mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) in her studies, and focusing on mediating and moderating mechanisms that impact outcomes. She has conducted research on ethnic minority populations within the United States, as well as international research with researchers in Beijing (Peking University Institute of Mental Health), Wuhan (Wuhan University School of Public Health), and Hefei (Hefei Technology University) in China. Since 2006, she has served as Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal, Ageing International, published by Springer-Verlag, which addresses challenges of global aging and strategies for addressing them.
Mariana López-Ortega, PH.D. is currently working as a Researcher at the Mexican National Institute of Geriatrics, National Institutes of Health. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Public Health and Policy form the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. Her current lines of research include long-term care for older adults, the supply of informal care for Mexican older adults and its costs, and the social determinants of ageing and health.
Silvia Mejia, PH.D. is a professor of the Department of Population Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico. She received her Master’s Degree in Psychobiology and, Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the National University of Mexico. Since 2008, she has been part of the National Research System (level II). Her area of research for the last 20 years has been on cognitive aging where she has focused on measurement issues in Latino populations and on the epidemiology of cognitive impairment and dementia with Mexican and Mexican-American populations. She works as a consultant for the Mexican Health and Aging Study and currently collaborates closely with Dr. Rebeca Wong in the MHAS Cognitive Aging Ancillary Study (MexCog).
Jesús Menéndez Jiménez, M.D. graduated from medical school and became a specialist in geriatrics at the Medical University of Havana in 1980 and 1988 respectively. He obtained his Master’s Degree in Public Health and Aging in 2008. He is currently a professor of Geriatrics and Researcher of the Medical University of Havana and Director of the PAHO-WHO Collaborating Center “Public Health and Aging.” He also serves as the President of the Advisory Council of the Rector for the Geriatrics Specialty of the Medical University of Havana, as well as a member of the Academic Faculty of Nursing and of the Master’s Degree Public Health and Aging of the university. He is also President of the Geriatric State Court of the Specialty and the Second Degree Court of the Specialty and has published numerous research articles and books.
Manuel Pastor, PH.D. is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC) where he directs the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII). He is the USC Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, and holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Pastor writes and speaks widely on issues including demographic change, economic inequality, community empowerment, environmental justice, and social movements. His recent books include: Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration, co-edited with John Mollenkopf; and Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas, co-authored with Chris Benner. Pastor’s current work and forthcoming book examines the last several decades of economic, social, and environmental transformations in California – and what they can tell us about the road ahead for the U.S.
*Catherine Pérez is a doctoral candidate in Gerontology at the University of Southern California who has a strong commitment to addressing inequalities in Hispanic health and aging. Her research is focused primarily on how race/ethnicity influences health and well-being across the adult life course, and how sociocultural variation, which includes socioeconomic, migratory, cultural, behavioral, and linguistic experiences, leads to disparities in health and aging among Hispanics. Her dissertation research integrates multilevel information on sociocultural factors, health care access and utilization, and the sociomedical environment to advance understanding of the risks for developing hypertension and diabetes among older Hispanic populations. She hopes that results from the study will offer additional insight in the determinants of health and the factors that contribute to Hispanic health disparities, and inform interventions targeted at addressing disease burden to improve quality of life among Hispanics.
Luis Miguel Gutiérrez Robledo, M.D., PH.D. is an internal medicine specialist and became a geriatrician in France where he worked as assistant professor at the University of Grenoble. Later on, he received his PH.D. in Public Health from the University of Bordeaux. He has served in the faculty of the National University of Mexico School of Medicine since 1994. He is a member of the National Academies of Medicine of Mexico and France. Dr. Gutiérrez’s research agenda focuses on the epidemiology of aging and more specifically on frailty and dementia and the interface between both conditions. He has served in various national and global committees including the Advisory Committee at the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics, and the World Health Organization. He has more than 250 publications with an H index of 22 and co-authors as well in Europe, Mexico, and the US. He was the founder in 1989 of the first Department of Geriatric Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Mexico; in 2009 he was appointed as the founding Director General of the National Institute of Geriatrics.
*Joseph L. Saenz, PH.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Saenz completed his Ph.D. in Population Health Science at The University of Texas Medical Branch in 2016. His research focuses on the aging population in Mexico and on Mexican-Americans in the United States. Particularly, he is interested in how socioeconomic factors throughout the life-course influence cognition, disability, and mortality in old age. In addition, Saenz is very interested in the cognitive health of older adults living in rural Mexico.
*Sebastián Antonio Jiménez Solís, M.A. studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and focused on two specialties in Microfinance and Gender Studies in the economy. He is currently pursuing his Master in Population and Development at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Mexico). He has worked as assistant professor and research assistant at the Economic Research Institute of UNAM. His areas of research interest include aging, poverty, inequalities, and income in old age. He received the Gabino Barreda Prize for his distinguished academic record.
*Qian Sun is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Master’s degree in Sociology from Iowa State University with a minor in Statistics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of population aging, health, and migration. She is dedicated to the study of aging and its associated health problems across the world. In particular, she is interested in the physical and mental health of the left-behind elders in China as well as of older Mexican adults with varying degrees of US migration experience.
Wassim Tarraf, PH.D. is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Gerontology and in the Department of Healthcare Sciences at Wayne State University, and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Michigan State University. Dr. Tarraf is a gerontologist with a broad interest in issues related to public health and aging. His primary research focuses on minority aging, particularly in immigrants and Latinos, and racial/ethnic health and healthcare disparities. He is an affiliated investigator with the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL) and co-investigator and lead statistician on its ancillary Investigation of Neurocognitive Aging (SOL-INCA) study.
Elizabeth Vásquez, DR.PH. received her Dr.PH. in Epidemiology at New York Medical College, School of Public Health Practice. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics department at the School of Public Health, University at Albany. Dr. Vásquez’s primary research focuses on the effect of physical activity on health outcomes among older adults by examining individual-level indicators and the ecological impact of social determinants contribution to differential health outcomes in racial and ethnically diverse populations. Dr. Vásquez research also explores new ways for the assessment of physical activity among older adults of diverse racial and ethnic background in epidemiological studies. In addition, Dr. Vásquez is a mentee with the Program to Increase Diversity among Individuals Engaged in Health-Related Research (PRIDE). Dr. Vásquez is also an affiliated investigator with the Study of Latinos (SOL) and part of the Physical Activity Writing Group for this project.
±Steven P. Wallace, PH.D., is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Director of the NIA-funded Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research Coordinating Center, and associate director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (Center). Wallace is a leading scholar in the U.S. in the area of aging in communities of color. His interest in reaching a policy and key stakeholder audience has led him to also publish several dozen policy briefs and reports at the Center. Those briefs and his other research have received broad media coverage, including articles and stories in The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report and National Public Radio. He has testified at state legislative hearings, and his research has informed state laws. Funding for his work is currently from CDC, DHHS, NIH, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and received many awards including the APHA Aging & Public Health Section’s leadership award and the Birren Senior Scholar Award from the California Council on Gerontology & Geriatrics.
Poster Judge Biographies
Terrence D. Hill, PH.D., (Presider of Emerging Scholar Poster Session), considers the central aim of his research to be to describe and explain the social inequality in misery and human suffering. He addresses this aim by conducting original theoretical and empirical research on the social distribution of health, health-relevant behavior, and mortality risk. Hill’s research draws from Sociology, Social Psychology, Medical Sociology, and Social Epidemiology to frame health as an expression or outcome of social and cultural forces, including religion, neighborhood context, social relationships, socioeconomic status, gender, race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Hill’s publications appear in a range of journals like the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, The Journals of Gerontology, The Gerontologist, American Journal of Public Health, Labour Economics, and Social Work. He has also published chapters in the Handbook of Sociology of Aging, Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, and Handbook of Religion and Society.
Donald A. Lloyd, PH.D. is a Research Associate Professor at the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He earned his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Toronto in 2000. His research has focused on life course epidemiology, the study of adult health disparities in relation to lifelong processes including cumulative stress exposure. He has worked on several large-scale epidemiologic studies in Canada and the US, with publications on alcohol and drug dependence as well as PTSD and major depressive disorder. These studies support the idea that the influence of stressful events on each of these outcomes is additive; irrespective of more recent stressful events, the experience of major and potentially traumatic stressors earlier in life is associated with current risk for psychiatric disorder. These findings suggest that understanding a patient’s total history is valuable in a clinical context, even when dealing with more immediate stressors, including those that may be associated with the migratory experiences of new arrivals to the US.
Toni Miles, M.D., PH.D. believes that the population burden of chronic disease can, in part, be attributed to the illnesses occurring with the end of those relationships. Dr. Miles is a Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Georgia, College of Public Health. She currently leads a multi-part study of the Public Health Consequences of loss and grief in a longevity society for persons with advanced chronic disease. The goal of the study is quality improvement in hospice bereavement care that supports resilience and measurably diminishes illness rates among survivors. Loss, in general, is a risk factor for subsequent illness. This project combines qualitative and quantitative methods to facilitate implementation of policy and to study Population Health changes associated with the death of its members.
Silvia Mejía-Arango, PH.D. is a professor of the Department of Population Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico. She received her Master’s Degree in Psychobiology and, PhD in Neuroscience by the National University of Mexico. Since 2008, she is part of the National Research System (level II). Her area of research for the last 20 years has been on cognitive aging where she has focused on measurement issues in Latino populations and on the epidemiology of cognitive impairment and dementia with Mexican and Mexican-American populations. She works as a consultant for the Mexican Health and Aging Study and currently collaborates closely with Dr Rebeca Wong in the MHAS Cognitive Aging Ancillary Study (MexCog).
Susan Enguidanos, PH.D. is Associate Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology with a joint appointment with the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Dr. Enguidanos conducts research in the field of palliative care, including a home-based model that is currently being implemented in many Kaiser Permanente facilities nationally. She has conducted extensive research in investigating ethnic variation in access to and use of hospice care, work that led to the development and implementation of theoretically-driven interventions aimed at improving access to hospice care for these populations. She is Principal Investigator of a study testing a social work intervention to improve care setting transitions among older adults as they move from hospital to home. She has published the findings from her research in several peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of American Geriatric Society, Journal of Palliative Medicine, Journal of Pain & Symptom Management, Journal of Social Work in End of Life & Palliative Care, Social Work in Health Care, and Drugs in Society. Dr. Enguidanos is the editor of Evidenced-Based Interventions for Community Dwelling Older Adults, a book that examines research focused on improving the health of seniors living in the community.
Zach Gassoumis, PH.D. is a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. His research focuses on securing a basic quality of life for older adults, specifically within the areas of elder abuse, economic security, and the provision of health, social, and protective services. Much of his research involves an application of quantitative methodologies to large, population-based datasets. Along with his colleagues in the Secure Old Age lab, Dr. Gassoumis has identified the value added when the most severe cases of abuse and neglect are presented to an elder abuse multidisciplinary team, the elder abuse forensic center. Dr. Gassoumis’ research on economic security has looked primarily at economic disparities between racial/ethnic and immigrant groups, specifically the intersection between immigration/naturalization and lifespan income and wealth. Funding for Dr. Gassoumis’ research projects has come from sources including federal (National Institute of Justice, Administration on Community Living, National Institute on Aging), state (California Department of Public Health, California Department of Social Services), foundation (Ford Foundation, the Archstone Foundation, The SCAN Foundation), and other non-profit entities (AARP).
Mariana López-Ortega, PH.D. is currently working as Researcher at the Mexican National Institute of Geriatrics, National Institutes of Health. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Public Health and Policy form the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. Her current lines of research include long-term care for older adults, the supply of informal care for Mexican older adults and its costs, and the social determinants of ageing and health.
María P. Aranda, PH.D., is an Associate Professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She is a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience providing mental health services to middle-aged older adults and their families. Her research and teaching specializations address the unique needs of middle-age and older adults with co-occurring medical and psychiatric illnesses. Dr. Aranda focuses on psychosocial intervention development, and evaluation of bilingual, evidence-based interventions on behalf of adults with chronic medical conditions and disabilities in the United States. Dr. Aranda has served on three consensus committees sponsored by the National Academy of Medicine on the geriatric workforce in mental health and substance use service sectors, family caregiving to older adults with functional limitations, and financial capacity determination among social security beneficiaries.
±indicates the biography is of a keynote speaker
*indicates the biography is of an emerging scholar who was selected for an oral presentation of their submitted poster abstract