Health of Older Minorities

This application seeks funds for 5 years, to continue the current NIH-funded T32 program for Minority Health and Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), to support 3 pre-doctoral and 1 postdoctoral 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 under-represented groups in general. The post-doctoral fellows and the pre-doctoral students are housed in the Sealy Center on Aging, with which most T32 faculty are affiliated. The pre-doctoral students receive their degree from the School of Public and Population Health, and benefit by interacting with PhD students in other programs, funded by AHRQ and by the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Our faculty have a long history of epidemiological, social and behavioral research on aging with particular strengths in Hispanic population aging. Of relevance to the proposed T32 is that 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). Our faculty hold multiple investigator-initiated grants, as well as multi-disciplinary research infrastructure grants on aging, including a Pepper Center for Independent Older Adults and a Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR). The 26 faculty members affiliated with the T32 program represent research strengths in multiple disciplines - epidemiology, demography, anthropology, sociology, economics, public health, rehabilitation sciences, geriatrics, and health policy. They also represent five schools and various departments across the campus. Our plan is to build on our strengths and train scientists in social/ behavioral and epidemiological approaches related to aging in Hispanic/Latino populations as well as health disparities in general. As in our current program, we will make special efforts to recruit trainees from under-represented backgrounds, while all our trainees will focus their research on the health of minority older adults. Compared to our previous grant, new in our proposed program are: a) expanded group of mentors in the training program, b} a larger recruitment pool for pre-doctoral trainees, and c) one new area of development for trainees: skills for growing in diverse teams, including diversity in disciplines, race/ethnicity, gender, and seniority composition of the research teams.