Emerging Issues in Minority Aging Research

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Emerging Issues in Minority Aging Research will create five different one-day conferences on current NIA priority areas relevant to minority aging research. The conference series goal is to increase the quality, quantity, and relevance to communities of color of NIA-fundable research by providing both junior and senior researchers with new knowledge and greater interest in these emerging issues as applied to minority elderly. This is significant because the U.S. racial and ethnic minority older population is growing rapidly: minorities will increase from 25% to over 40% of the older population between 2020 and 2050. Protecting and improving the health of these elderly requires a highly skilled research workforce with interests and capabilities to produce new and useful knowledge. Yet the number and success of minority researchers funded by NIH is insufficient. The NIA's Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) program works to mentor and train junior faculty who conduct research on minority aging to strengthen the next generation of NIA-funded ethnic and racial minority research and researchers. Conferences topics are: Recruitment and retention of elders of color; Access to care & improved outcomes for cognitively impaired minority elderly; Applying the science of behavior change to intervention development for elders of color; Pragmatic intervention trials with minority elders; and Using biological measures of risk in health disparities research with older adults. Each will feature leading scholars on the topic, top scholars on minority aging, and representatives from multiple NIA-funded centers and networks. The programs will disseminate the state of the art on the topic, inform researchers on how existing research can be modified or expanded to be more valid and relevant for minority elders, and provide resources that can be used by researchers to further develop the fields in research with minority elders. They will be held as preconferences to the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) annual scientific meetings with an average of 50 participants each; the majority will be minorities and/or women. The planning committee will be compromised of the confirmed keynote speakers who are leaders in the field and researchers from RCMAR sites with expertise in the topic. The executive committee will be the RCMAR directors group. The project is innovative in the topics covered, the research networks involved, and the synergy with GSA. Program evaluation includes a process evaluation, a retrospective pre/post knowledge and confidence survey, and four-month follow-up survey on conference impacts. The lead investigators are national leaders in minority and aging research who have successfully led previous GSA preconferences. This proposal is a renewal of the previous successful series with new topics but similar objectives of improving the knowledge and interest in emerging issues supported by NIA among those with research agendas in minority aging and raising awareness of minority aging among leading researchers in each topic.