Center on Aging and Population Sciences

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Overall: Abstract The University of Texas at Austin requests P30 funding to establish a new Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging—The Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS). The new Center’s overarching mission is to galvanize novel research that illuminates how biosocial and environmental factors intersect, compound, and cascade throughout the life course to shape health and well-being at older ages. CAPS will provide specialized programming and leadership to foster innovative demographic and population- based research on aging. The Center will leverage substantial faculty strengths and new institutional commitments to greatly amplify the impact of NIA P30 support. CAPS will share administrative resources with the highly successful Population Research Center (PRC) at UT Austin. The extensive experience and expertise of PRC administrators and staff will multiply the impact of CAPS activities to promote exceptional population-based research on aging. The Center’s specific aims are: 1) Expand and promote collaborations among scholars to address complex aging and population health issues, create a lively and supportive interdisciplinary community wherein exchange of ideas is encouraged and common, and grow the number and diversity of researchers in the field at all career stages, 2) Promote and sustain infrastructure development needed to provide high-quality services and resources to foster outstanding population-based research on aging, and 3) Oversee a project development and pilot program to seed new lines of population-based research on aging. Over the next 5 years, CAPS will address critical research questions regarding dynamic and intersecting factors throughout the life course that shape diversity in aging and health within three overarching research themes: 1) Life course precursors of advantage and disadvantage at older ages, 2) Family demography, social engagement, and social isolation, and 3) Place, aging, and health. Funding is requested for two infrastructure cores. The Administrative and Research Suppoert Core will set programmatic and service priorities; build an interdisciplinary community of population scientists at the University; provide outstanding services that facilitate the development of large-scale population research; ensure coordination between cores, and serve as the communications hub between CAPS, NIA, and the Coordinating Center. The Program Development and Pilot Core will generate novel scientific projects of well-established scientists as well as early-stage and new-to- aging scholars to significantly advance population-based research on aging; build CAPS research portfolio via the Center’s pilot project program, and foster evolution of nascent ideas into proposals for extramural funding. CAPS will prioritize pilot projects that are most likely to advance knowledge, address NIA priorities, shift conceptual paradigms, develop novel sources of data, and lead to major NIA funding within CAPS themes.