Center on the Demography of Aging

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Population Aging Research Center (PARC) at the University of Pennsylvania proposes a 5-year continuation of its existing P30 Center, with the following five signatures themes for 2014-2019: i) Health, disease, and mortality risks at older ages, incorporating race and gender differences, including period and cohort risks and their underlying social and biological mechanisms; ii) Early-life conditions and older adult health, behavior, and well-being: an exploration of early developmental circumstances that may be crucial for shaping how we grow old, including nutrition, infectious disease, social support, education, and gene-environment interactions prenatally and during childhood; iii) Global aging: sociocultural, economic, and environmental circumstances impacting the well-being of older individuals around the world; consequences for health and aging of lifestyle changes on rapidly transitioning developing countries; iv) Biodemographical and evolutionary approaches to life history, including innovative analytic methodologies for collecting and analyzing metabolic, and genetic biomarkers of aging, evaluation of non-human animal models for explaining human aging trajectories, and use of evolutionary frameworks for re-interpreting data and generating new testable hypotheses; v) Domestic/international perspectives on well-being at older ages, emphasizing lifecycle decision-making and old-age financial security and their interactions with changing work patterns, family support, savings and pensions, health insurance, and health care systems. Attentive to the current budgetary situation, PARC has restructured and streamlined its operations to propose a smaller, but highly efficient and productive Center that is the hub of research activity of 35 Research Associates working on aging-related issues. Three Cores are proposed: Core A: "Administrative & Research Support"(Valeggia, PI) to provide dedicated administrative and data management services to Associates, convene an External Advisory Committee, and establish an initiative aimed at increasing the number of NIH/NIA grant applications, especially from Pilot projects Pi's; Core B: "Program Development" (Valeggia, PI) to sustain & evaluate the Pilot Program; support is requested for three 2-year pilots that emphasize one or more signature themes; Core C: "External Innovative Network" (Behrman, PI) to expand and strengthen five research & collaboration networks: the Latin American Network on Aging (LANA), the Network on Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa (NASSA), the Evolutionary Network (EvoDemo), the Network on Effects of Early Life on Mature Adults (NEELMA), and the Network on Migration Advantage (NeMA).