Health of Older Minorities

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ABSTRACT This application seeks funds for 5 years, to continue the current NIH-funded T32 program for Hispanic and other Minority Health and Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), to support 3 pre- doctoral and 1 post-doctoral trainees per year. The program aims to increase and improve the pool of researchers with relevant expertise to help address challenges raised by the growing diversity in aging of the United States population. Given our strengths in the areas of Hispanic/Latino aging with a multi-disciplinary, population based perspective, we focus on factors related to health disparities involving these populations as well as minorities in general. The pre-doctoral students benefit by interacting with PhD students in other Population Health Science programs, funded by the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. The post- doctoral fellows as well as the pre-doctoral students are housed in the Sealy Center on Aging. Our faculty have had a long history of epidemiological, social and behavioral research on aging with particular strengths in Hispanic population aging. UTMB is currently the home of two large population-based, longitudinal, cohort studies funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Hispanic Established Population for the Epidemiological Study of the Elderly (Hispanic EPESE) and the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), and hosts multi-disciplinary research grants on aging. The current faculty in the affiliated programs have strengths in sociology, demography, anthropology, social epidemiology, medicine, public health, rehabilitation sciences, and geriatrics. Our plan is to build on our strengths and train scientists in social/ behavioral and epidemiological factors related to aging in Hispanic/Latino aging as well as health disparities in general. As is the case in our current program, special efforts will be made to recruit students from underrepresented backgrounds, and all our trainees will focus their research on the health of Hispanic and other minority older adults. Compared to our previous grant, new in our proposed program are: a) new leadership in the training program and new key faculty, b) a strengthened recruitment approach, and c) one new area of thematic emphasis.