News

DURHAM, N.C. -- The walking speed of 45-year-olds, particularly their fastest walking speed without running, can be used as a marker of their aging brains and bodies. Slower walkers were shown to have “accelerated aging” on a 19-measure scale devised by researchers, and their lungs, teeth and immune systems tended to be in worse shape than the people who walked faster. “The thing that’s really striking is that this is in 45-year-old people, not the geriatric patients who are usually assessed with such measures,” said lead researcher Line J.H. Rasmussen, a post-doctoral researcher in the Duke University department of psychology & neuroscience.
The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) is the oldest and largest interdisciplinary scientific organization devoted to the advancement of gerontological research, learning, and practice.
Drs. Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi have have been named the 2019 Outstanding Postdoc Mentors at Duke.  Both Moffitt and Caspi are DUPRI Research Scholars and Professors of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.  
If you asked Jenny Tung’s parents, “no one’s kids that they knew of went off to Africa every summer to look at monkeys.” But Tung has been doing just that since her first trip to Kenya in 2006 to study the wild baboons of Amboseli.
Duke and USC researchers propose the Alzheimer’s Disease Exposome to address gaps in understanding how environmental factors interact with genetics to increase or reduce risk for the disease.
The Add Health Parent Data User Study Workshop occurred on August 14-15, and the Triangle Area's Social and Biological Determinants of Health (SBDoH) Working Group meeting was held on August 22-23
DUPRI Scholars Scott Lynch and Matt Dupre  recently received an NIH/R21 award to study the social determinants of access to care and 30-day readmission in older adults with heart failure. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, the research builds on their work examining how barriers to routine medical care lead to poor outcomes in those living with heart disease.

Professor Jane Waldfogel, Compton Foundation Centennial  Professor of Social Work for the Prevention of Children's and Youth Problems,  Columbia School of Social Work and Co-director of the Columbia Population Research Center, kicks off our DUPRI Fall 2019 Seminar Series

Last week, the Population Association of America (PAA) announced its elected Officers for 2020. DUPRI's M. Giovanna Merli joins new members  Deborah Carr (Boston U), Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (Berkeley), and Hedwig Lee (Wash U) to the PAA Board of Directors.

Demography of Aging was published in 1994 as the United States and the rest of the world faced the challenge of aging populations.  Written by experts from a variety of disciplines, it offered authoritative research on the emerging field of demography of aging.