The LCC pilot grant program nurtures the development of interdisciplinary collaborations and encourages innovative research on the demography and economics of aging. Support from our pilot grant program encourages the vibrant LCC research community and external network to prioritize and pursue pressing population-based questions related to later life course health and well-being through improved understanding of social and economic contexts, disparities, and social participation.
As part of this initiative, we request new proposals annually.
Do you have an idea for a pilot study in the Demography and Economics of Aging?
We want to hear it! Submit a short pitch by August 23, 2024.
Currently Funded Projects
Picture of Ruijia Chen
Understanding Cohort Differences in Dementia Prevalence in the United States: Quantifying the Impacts of Social, Behavioral, and Cardiovascular Risk Factors
Ruijia Chen, Postdoctoral Associate, Epidemiology, Boston University
The goal in this project is to quantify cohort trends in dementia prevalence and to evaluate the social, behavioral, and cardiovascular risk factors driving these differences in the overall population and across sex/gender and race and ethnicity using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The team will use an innovative counterfactual causal decomposition approach, integrating the age-period cohort (APC) model with g-computation. This approach allows for comparison between the observed dementia prevalence and a counterfactual scenario where all cohorts mirror the risk factor distributions of the cohort with the lowest prevalence.
Picture of Dylan Connor
Context and Cognitive Difficulty: A GeoAI Analysis of Social Disparities in Cognitive Ageing across Rural and Urban Places, 2000-2021
Dylan Conner, Associate Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University
This project will systematically examine the changing spatial prevalence of age-related cognitive difficulty across all communities in the United States from 2012 to 2022. The team will use individual and tract-level disability indicators from the American Community Survey to measure community trends in cognitive difficulty by birth cohort, age, sex, race and ethnicity. Their work will advance science regarding the contextual determinants ofage-related impairment and ADRD, potentially elucidating the social and spatial processes that drive ADRD risk.
Picture of Andrew Fenelon
Long-term implications of early life housing experiences in the US Public Housing program
Andrew Fenelon, Associate Professor, Epidemiology & Community Health, University of Minnesota
This project will advance scientific understanding using a novel data linkage to address a fundamental, significant question: Do improvements in early life housing conditions lead to long-term benefits for later life health, longevity, and physical and cognitive functioning? To answer this question, the team will leverage an innovative dataset of everyone who lived in US public housing in 1940, linked at the individual level to a quilt of other rich contemporary data, including detailed demographic, socioeconomic, contextual, health, and mortality data from 1969 through 2023.
Picture of Shou Wang
Does CMV Infection Explain Social-Related Health Disparities in Cancer Survivors?
Shuo Wang, Postdoctoral Associate, Labratory Medicine, University of Minnesota
The goal of study is to examine whether CMV infection (cytomegalovirus, a common virus infecting over 50% of the U.S. adult population,considered a marker of immune aging) mediates the associations of race/ethnicity and SES with age-related health outcomes, including muscle weakness, decreased functional performance, CVD, and mortality, in 1,650 elderly cancer survivors in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative US adult sample (≥50 years).