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Biographies of RSI Speakers
2002
- Prof. Axel Börsch-Supan, Ph.D.
- Judith Campisi, Ph.D.
- Deborah Carr, Ph.D.
- Anthony Cerami, Ph.D.
- Kaare Christensen, M.D., Ph.D.
- David Haig, Ph.D.
- James K. Hammitt, Ph.D.
- Ronald Lee, Ph.D.
- Michael W. Rich, M.D.
- Paul G. Shekelle, M.D., Ph.D.
Prof. Axel Börsch-Supan, Ph.D.
Department of Economics
University of Mannheim, Germany
Axel Börsch-Supan is Director of the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA) and Professor for Macroeconomics and Public Policy at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He is coordinator of SHARE, a large scale data collection effort for survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe financed by the European Commission and speaker of the special research unit on behavioral economics (Sonderforschungsbereich 504) at the University of Mannheim.
He holds a Diplom in Mathematics from Bonn University and a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. He started teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, then at Dortmund and at Dresden, Germany. Börsch-Supan is Member of the German Academy of Sciences "Leopoldina", of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin-Brandenburg, and of the Council of Advisors to the German Economics Ministry. He is Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, Mass.; Research Fellow of the Centre for European Policy Research (CEPR), London, England; and Research Professor of the Center of European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim.
Current Research Projects: Economic implications of population aging;
Household savings behavior; Pension reform and retirement behavior;
Pensions and corporate governance; Housing market models; Structural and
frictional unemployment.
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Judith Campisi, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist and Department Head
Department of Cell and Molecular Biology
Berkeley National Laboratory
Judith Campisi received her doctorate in Biochemistry from the State
University of New York, Stony Brook, and postdoctoral training in the
area of cell cycle regulation and cancer at the Harvard Medical School. As
an Assistant Professor at the Boston University Medical School, she became
interested the control of cellular senescence and its role in tumor suppression
and aging. In 1991, she moved her research program to the Berkeley
National Laboratory, where she continues to study cellular senescence and has established
a broad program in various aspects of aging. She is the recipient of a
MERIT award from the National Institute on Aging (1995) and the 1997
AlliedSignal Award for research on aging. She serves on several editorial boards
and advisory boards.
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Deborah Carr, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Assistant Research Scientist, Population Studies Center
University of Michigan
Deborah Carr is an assistant professor of sociology of University of Michigan, and an assistant research scientist at the Survey Research Center and Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. This fall, she will be joining the department of sociology and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. Carr received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1997. Her research focuses on psychological well-being among midlife and older adults, with a particular emphasis on how work and family roles and transitions affect mental health.
One strand of her research focuses on how men and women of different birth cohorts manage their work and family roles, and the implications of their successes and failures for psychological well-being. An overarching question is: how do men and women maintain positive self-esteem, when the criteria for successfully fulfilling work and family roles have shifted over time? This research has appeared in journals including Social Psychology Quarterly, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociological Methodology, and Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics. A second strand of her research focuses on psychological adjustment to widowhood among older adults. She is a co-investigator (with Professors Randolph Nesse and James House at University of Michigan) on the NIA-funded Changing Lives of Older Couples study, a prospective study of older widowed persons. Her research focuses on identifying those aspects of the marital relationship, and of the dying process that protect widowed persons from severe grief and depression. Research from this project has appeared in journals including Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, The Gerontologist, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
This summer, Carr is working with a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin in fielding the latest wave of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The respondents, now age 64, have been tracked since their teens. Carr will spearhead a project on end-of-life planning and decision making, and its implications for late-life health and well-being.
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Anthony Cerami, Ph.D.
Director, The Kenneth S. Warren Institute
Anthony Cerami is a founder and the Director of the Kenneth S. Warren Institute, a not-for-profit research institution located in Westchester County, NY, and Chairman of the Board of Warren Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is also Visiting Research Professor at New York University.
One of Dr. Cerami's most important discoveries has been to identify nonenzymatic glycation as the mechanism underlying the long-term complications of diabetes. He described the diagnostic utility of HbA1c. Dr. Cerami is also noted for his co-discovery of the cytokine TNFa in human clinical trials. Current research has focused on the role of chemokines, as well as cytokines in models of infectious disease.
Recently, Dr. Cerami and his colleagues have published results on the neuro-protective effects of systemically administered erythropoietin, demonstrating in animal models its potential use in brain injury and trauma, multiple sclerosis and cognitive dysfunction.
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Kaare Christensen MD, Ph.D.
Professor, Aging Research Center
Odense University Medical School
Kaare Christensen (M.D., Ph.D. Genetic Epidemiology, Odense University)
is a Professor at the Center for Health and Social Policy, Odense University,
Denmark, and Scientific co-head of The Danish Twin Registry, Odense University.
His research interests include: genetic-epidemiology, twin studies, aging,
age-related diseases, reproduction, fertility, congenital malformations,
fetal programming. He has published widely in the medical literature, including
the British Medical Journal, Science, and Lancet.
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David Haig, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Biology
Harvard University
David Haig, Ph.D., is an evolutionary geneticist/theorist at Harvard
who is interested in conflicts and conflict resolution with the genome,
with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations between
parents and offspring. He acquired his PhD at Macquarie University in
Australia, was an Endeavour Fellow in the Department of Plant Science at
Oxford, and then a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. For
the past seven years he has been on the Harvard faculty in the
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His current interests
include the evolution of linkage groups and the evolution of
viviparity.
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James K. Hammitt, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences
Department of Health Policy and Management
Harvard School of Public Health
James K. Hammitt is Associate Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences and Director of the program in Environmental Science and Risk Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. His teaching and research concern the development and application of quantitative methods-including benefit-cost, decision, and risk analysis-to health and environmental policy in both industrialized and developing countries. Research interests include the management of long-term environmental issues such as global climate change and stratospheric-ozone depletion, the evaluation of ancillary benefits and countervailing risks associated with risk-control measures, and the characterization of social preferences over health and environmental risks using revealed-preference and contingent-valuation methods.
Professor Hammitt is a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board Advisory Council on Clear Air Compliance Analysis, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Implications of Dioxin in the Food Supply, the American Statistical Association Committee on Energy Statistics (the Advisory Committee to the US Energy Information Administration), and the National Science Foundation panel for Decision, Risk and Management Science. He holds degrees in Applied Mathematics (A.B., Sc.M.) and Public Policy (M.P.P., Ph.D.) from Harvard University. Previously, he was Senior Mathematician at the RAND Corporation and on the faculty of the RAND Graduate School of Policy Studies.
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Ronald Lee, Ph.D.
Professor of Demography and Economics
University of California, Berkeley
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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Michael W. Rich, MD
Director, Geriatric Cardiology Program
Washington University School of Medicine
Michael W. Rich, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Director
of the Geriatric Cardiology Program at Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Rich received his M.D. degree from the University
of Illinois in Chicago, and his internal medicine and cardiology training
at the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis. He has published over 80 articles
as well as numerous book chapters on the management of cardiovascular disease
in the elderly. Dr. Rich is also past president of the Society of Geriatric
Cardiology, an international organization dedicated to the advancement
of research, education, and patient care in older individuals with cardiovascular
disease. Dr. Rich is an internationally recognized expert on cardiovascular
disease in the elderly and on heart failure disease management. In addition
to heart failure, current research interests include acute and chronic
coronary heart disease and cardiomyopathies in the elderly.
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Paul G. Shekelle, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine
UCLA Department of Medicine
Paul G. Shekelle (M.D., Duke University, 1982; Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1993) is a consultant in health sciences at RAND, Associate Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, and a staff physician at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles. His research focus has been in the application of innovative methods to the assessment and improvement of the quality of care. He spent 6 years as a Career Development Awardee of the VA Health Services Research and Development Service. Dr. Shekelle spent 1996-1997 in the United Kingdom as an Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy studying how quality of care was being assessed in the National Health Service. Since 1997, Dr. Shekelle has been the Director of the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center, and has led numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses in that capacity. Dr. Shekelle also co-directs the Assessing Care of the Vulnerable Elderly project, which seeks to develop a comprehensive set of quality tools to assess care for this population.
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