Workshop on Aging Agenda, Speakers

2003



Eileen Crimmins

Eileen Crimmins is the director of the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health. She is currently supported by the NIA for two projects. One project on ìThe Role of Biological Factors in Determining Differences in Health by Education and Income Level" is being undertaken with Teresa Seeman. This project examines how markers of biological risk can be used to explain the poorer health outcomes of older people with less education and lower incomes. Biological risk includes factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, homocysteine, antioxidants, fibrinogen, and CRP. The second NIA supported project is a joint project with Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan. This project compares health and risk factors for persons in Japan and the United States. The USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health (CBPH)is co-directed at USC by Caleb Finch. At UCLA the Center is directed by Teresa Seeman and co-directed by David Reuben. This Center is a unique collaboration between demographers and biologists at USC and epidemiologists and geriatricians at UCLA. The purpose of the Center is to integrate medical, biological, and epidemiological information to model and predict population health trends. The Center provides pilot project money for relevant research and promote a series of seminars and workshops on the two campuses.

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Douglas Ewbank

Douglas Ewbank is a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center and the Population Aging Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. After working on African demography, the evaluation of health programs in developing countries and historical demography, he shifted his research to work on Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related disorders. This work has lead him into research on population genetics and the modeling of chronic disease. He has collaborated with colleagues at Penn's Alzheimer's Disease Center on such topics as caregiver evaluation of behavior in AD, the effects of symptoms usually associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) on the rate of progression in AD, and the association of various pathologic markers with the incidence of dementia in PD patients. His recent writings include an introduction to genetics written for demographers and other social scientists that appeared in the volume Cells and Surveys published by the National Academy Press. Recent articles include: "Deaths attributable to Alzheimer's disease in the U.S." (Am J Public Health, 1999), "Mortality differences by APOE genotype estimated from demographic synthesis" (Genetic Epidemiology, 2002), and "A multistate model of the genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease" (Experimental Aging Research, 2002).

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Robert William Fogel

Robert William Fogel received his B.A. from Cornell University, his M.A. from Columbia University, and his Ph.D., in Economics, from Johns Hopkins University. He has held faculty positions at the University of Rochester, Cambridge University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions in the Graduate School of Business, director of the Center for Population Economics, and a member of the Department of Economics and of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is also co-director of the Program on Cohort Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 (with Douglass C. North). During his graduate work under Simon Kuznets, he became interested in combining the study of economics and history to understand long-term technological and institutional change. Early work focused on railroads and economic growth in American history, which was followed by analyses of the economics of American slavery (jointly with S. L. Engerman) published as Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) and Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (4 vols., 1989-1992). Last year he published a reinterpretation of Americaís current prosperity, material and spiritual, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). Since the late 1980s his principal research has focused on explaining the secular decline in mortality and the changing pattern of aging over the life cycle in the United States. The latest findings from this project are scheduled to be published in 2002 in a book entitled The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. His other current research includes a study of the high-performing Asian economies, research into nutrition and longevity, an assessment of the twentieth-century historical debates over American slavery, and historical work on the development of the discipline of economics in the twentieth century.

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Linda P. Fried

Linda P. Fried is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and of Public Health. Dr. Fried is a geriatrician and epidemiologist. She is Director, Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins and Director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, a multidisciplinary center of excellence for research and education on aging at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. She leads a research program directed at health promotion and prevention of disease, frailty, and disability in older adults, with approaches including public health and clinical interventions. This research includes the Womenís Health and Aging Studies and the Cardiovascular Health Study, for which she is the Principal Investigator. She is also Principal Investigator of the newly initiated Older American Independence Center, funded by the National Institute on Aging to discover the causes of frailty as people age. Dr. Fried has published numerous articles on these issues central to improving health promotion in older adults in leading medical and public health journals. Dr. Fried serves as an advisor for such organizations as the Paul Beeson Faculty Scholars in Aging Research, the Health and Retirement Survey and the AAMC Task Force on Research; she is on the editorial board of a number of journals dedicated to the health of older adults, including the Journal of Gerontology (Medical Sciences), and the American Journal of Medicine. Dr. Fried has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2000 APHA Archstone Award, the Marion Spencer Fay Award for the year 2000 Distinguished Woman Physician/Scientist, the 2000 Herbert R. DeVries Distinguished Research Award of the Council on Aging and Adult Development, among other awards, and was named as one of Marylandís Top 100 Women for the year 2003. Dr. Fried is the recipient of an NIH MERIT Award and is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians.

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Robert M. Hauser

Robert M. Hauser is Vilas Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has directed the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1968. Hauser currently directs the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, which is supported by the National Institute on Aging. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and Board on Testing and Assessment. His current research interests include trends in educational progression and social mobility in the United States among racial and ethnic groups, the uses of educational assessment as a policy tool, the effects of families on social and economic inequality, and changes in socioeconomic standing, health, and well-being across the life course.

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Ronald Lee

Ronald Lee has a MA in Demography from the University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Harvard, and spent a postdoctoral year at INED, the French National Demographic Institute. He taught in the Economics Department at Michigan for eight years, and then went to UC Berkeley where he is Professor of Demography and Economics, and Director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging. His research interests are currently primarily in the economic demography of intergenerational transfers and in aging, but he also works on methods for forecasting mortality and population, particularly probabilistic forecasts. In an earlier life, he worked on the role of population change in economic history, population and economic development, and externalities to childbearing. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Member of the British Academy, and has received the Mindel Shepps Award and the Taeuber Award.

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Teresa Seeman

Teresa Seeman is a Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. Seeman is an epidemiologist with additional postdoctoral training in neuroendocrinology. She has extensive experience in community-based epidemiologic research focusing on psychological and social factors in health and aging and has served as a Principal Investigator for the MacArthur Studies of Successful Aging. Many of Seeman's recent publications have focused on the effects of social and psychological factors on neurodendocrine regulation and cognitive and physical functioning. Seeman is Co-Director, with David Reuben, of the Hartford Center for Excellence at UCLA, a training program for geriatric fellows who plan a career in research. Seeman and Crimmins have been collaborating on analyses of the MacArthur data. Their research focuses on the biological mechanisms through which SES differences in health arise and the biological mechanisms that intervene between social and psychological characteristics and health outcomes. These mechanisms include markers for the health of a variety of bodily systems including the cardiovascular system, the HPA axis, the sympathetic nervous system, metabolic system, hemopoietic system, and markers of coagulation, antioxidants, renal function, and pulmonary function. Seeman is also currently collaborating with demographers at Georgetown and Princeton Universities on a recently approved longitudinal study of aging in Taiwan (Maxine Weinstein, Noreen Goldman and Burton Singer).

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James P. Smith

James P. Smith (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1972) holds the RAND Chair in Labor Markets and Demographic Studies and was the Director of RAND's Labor and Population Studies Program from 1977-1994. He has led numerous projects, including studies of immigration, the economics of aging, black-white wages and employment, the effects of economic development on labor markets, wealth accumulation and savings behavior, and the interrelation of health and economic status among the elderly. He has also worked on a wide range of other projects, including analyses of wrongful death cases, the labor supply effects of income maintenance programs, the market for college graduates, and economic development in Southeast Asia. He is currently Principal Investigator for The New Immigrant Survey, a cost-effective survey that yields adequate sample size of the foreign born, has known sampling properties, permits longitudinal analyses, and can answer policy questions of particular relevance to immigration. Dr. Smith was the Chair of the Panel on Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration (1995-1997), Committee on Population and Committee on National Statistics, National Academy of Sciences. The Panel was convened to examine the interconnections of immigration, population, and the economy, and to provide evidence about the impact of immigration. Dr. Smith has served on the National Advisory Board for the Poverty Institute and on the Population Research Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He chaired the National Institute on Aging's Ad Hoc Advisory Panel on NIA's Extramural Priorities for Data Collection in Health and Retirement Economics and currently serves on the NIA Data Monitoring Committee for both the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and Asset and Health Dynamics of the Oldest-Old (AHEAD). Smith has written a number of papers on the quality of asset data in both HRS and AHEAD and racial and ethnic differences in personal net worth, Social Security, and pension wealth. He is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); and was the public representative appointed by the Governor on the California OSHA Board. He has received the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award, the most distinguished honor NIH grants to a researcher.

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James W. Vaupel

James W. Vaupel, who was born on May 2, 1945 in New York, is married and has two daughters. He studied mathematical statistics, business administration, and public policy at Harvard University, where he received his BA in 1967 and his Ph.D. in 1978. Prof. Vaupel has taught at Duke University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Rostock, Germany. He is currently a member of the Committee on Population of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and he recently completed a five-year term on the National Advisory Council on Aging. Dr. Vaupel is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany as well as being Senior Research Scientist and Head of the Program on Population, Policy, and Aging at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. Two years ago he won the Irene Taeuber Award for outstanding accomplishments in demographic research and later this year he will be awarded the IPSEN Prize for pathbreaking research on longevity.

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Robert J. Willis

Robert J. Willis, Professor of Economics, received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1971. He joined the University of Michigan in 1995 and holds joint appointments with the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research and the Population Studies Center. Before coming to Michigan, Professor Willis held appointments at the University of Chicago, SUNY at Stony Brook, and Stanford University. He has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America, has served on advisory boards for a number of surveys including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the High School and Beyond Survey and the Health and Retirement Survey and was recently appointed as representative to the Census Advisory Board by the American Economic Association. Professor Willis' research interests include labor economics, economic demography and economic development. Among his publications are: ALife Insurance and Gender Bias of Poverty in Widowhood@ with David Weir; AMotives for Intergenerational Transfers: Evidence from Indonesia and Malaysia@ with Lee Lillard, under review by Demography, March 1996; AIntergenerational Educational Mobility: Effects of Family and State in Malaysia,@ with Lee Lillard, Journal of Human Resources , Fall 1994; ATransfers Among Divorced Couples: Evidence and Interpretation@ with Yoram Weiss, Journal of Labor Economics, October 1993; AA Theory of the Equilibrium Interest Rate in an Overlapping Generations Model: Life Cycles, Institutions, and Population Growth@, in B. Arthur and R. Lee and G. Rodgers (eds.) Economic Consequences of Alternative Population Pattern, Oxford University Press, 1988; AWage Determinants: A Survey and Reinterpretation of Human Capital Earnings Functions@, in O. Ashenfelter and R. Layard, eds. Handbook of Labor Economics, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1987; AChildren as Collective Goods and Divorce Settlements@, with Yoram Weiss, Journal of Labor Economics, 3(3) (July 1985); AEducation and Self Selection@, with Sherwin Rosen, Journal of Political Economy, Supplement, October 1979; and AA New Approach to the Economic Theory of Fertility Behavior,@ Journal of Political Economy, March/April 1973.

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David A. Wise

David A. Wise, John F. Stambaugh Professor of Political Economy, came to the Kennedy School after graduate work in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His past research includes analysis of youth employment, the economics of education and schooling decisions, and methodological econometric work. His work now focuses on issues related to population aging, and he directs a large project on the economics of aging and health care. His recent books and papers include: Social Security and Retirement Around the World; Frontiers in the Economics of Aging; Facing the Age Wave;Inquiries in the Economics of Aging; "The Transition to Personal Accounts and Increasing Retirement Wealth: Macro and Micro Evidence"; "Aging and Housing Equity: Another Look"; "Implications of Rising Personal Retirement Saving"; "Personal Retirement Savings Programs and Asset Accumulation: Reconciling the Evidence"; and "The Taxation of Pensions: A Shelter Can Become a Trap."

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