Lauren Brown wants to challenge the way researchers study older Black and Brown adults — and to question how researchers define “old” in the first place.
With research focused on the complex interplay between stress and health, Brown aims to reframe the narrative around Black health and aging, from that of disadvantage in relation to the white population, to a heterogenous one of resourcefulness and agency in the face of numerous obstacles, including structural racism.
“I’m thinking about how we grounded measurement for everything that we do in science in white normative populations,” says Brown, an assistant professor of gerontology and the Edward L. Schneider, MD, Chair in Gerontological Research at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. But as she considers her own experiences as a Black woman and digs deeper into scientific findings, she’s come to believe, she says, that “these constructs are not equivalent across groups, and there may be more going on here than what we think is happening.”
Brown approaches her research through a biopsychosocial lens, systematically considering biological, psychological and social factors and how their interactions inform health, illness and health care delivery. Her goals are trifold: first, to understand the unique difficulties Black Americans face in maintaining physical and psychological well-being as they age; second, to more accurately depict the aging experiences of Black Americans; and finally, to promote data equity via her Linked Fate Data Collective, a data science lab devoted to publicly available, community-based and open-source data.
Brown is particularly gratified to be doing this work at USC, where she studied and played soccer — on a national championship team — as an undergraduate, and where she received her PhD from the Leonard Davis School in 2018. A Southern California native, Brown has lived in South L.A. for the past 15 years.
“I love the multidisciplinary coursework here at USC, and it’s lovely to be back to support underrepresented students,” she says. “I also think we have one of the most unique environments at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology since we are one of very few schools of aging that is physically located right in the center of a vibrant Black and Latine community.”
The problem with existing research starts at the most basic level, Brown says: with the data. Inequity and ingrained prejudices are “embedded at every level of the data collection and scientific process—there’s nothing that isn’t touched by it,” she said. “It takes a lot of unlearning in order to contend with it. That’s part of my life’s work.”
The Problem with Current Aging Research
Many early statisticians were also eugenicists, Brown says, bent on using statistics to prove the superiority of the white race. By not interrogating that history, researchers are likely to replicate some of its troubling findings, she says.
“We’re still using these frameworks where everything we do is comparing Black people to white people, as if that is the gold standard,” she says. “And it automatically creates this narrative that Black people are less than because of the way we’ve set up research questions.”
Take the question of aging itself. What is “an older adult”? Brown asks. If it’s someone who’s at least 65 years old, doesn’t that leave out many people of color, who are more likely to die at younger ages than their white counterparts due to a number of factors, including socioeconomic status, structural racism and hardship?
“People have to survive in order to get into that data set,” she says. “So now we have what’s called survivor bias, with the healthiest, most-advantaged, longest-lived people in our aging data sets.”
That means our picture of aging is limited to its impact on society’s best, healthiest members, who tend to be white, she says. From the point such a study begins, “it’s almost too late to understand aging,” she says, because of all the people with distressed backgrounds and compromised health whose bodies aged more quickly and who died too young to be included.
More specifically, Brown says, consider how structural inequities, embedded into the very framing of the research, impact findings on a narrower topic, like mental health.
The Black-White Gap
Brown says she’s particularly interested in the “paradoxical findings” about Black mental health. Prior research has found that Blacks report higher amounts of stress exposure than whites but lower levels of common psychiatric disorders. But in a 2020 paper, Brown found that — after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, marital status, employment status and chronic stress exposure — stress appraisal partially explained the Black-white gap in anxiety and completely explained Black-white differences in depressive symptoms.
“What oftentimes happens with these narratives around Black health and aging is that they’re dominated by statistics showing Black people dying early, with greater disease and disability relative to white Americans,” she says, “but actually when we measure other things like psychosocial health, stress exposure and stress appraisal, we find that there are counter-narratives where Black people are actively coping with the vast amounts of stress they are under and find ways to continue to survive and even thrive, but that is not what we designed these surveys to measure.”
Instead, she says, researchers need to deepen the questions they are asking beyond Black-white disparities, to understand that the measures they’re using to examine these questions may already set up the answers to predictable narratives about Black people and aging relative to white people.
“Then we can think about how the lived reality of mental health might be different for Black Americans and what we’re missing in that process,” she says. “That conversation is something that I’m very passionate about having, especially given that there are counterintuitive findings that we can’t explain.”
Rethinking Health Indicators
Another example of such counterintuitive findings is research on telomere length. Telomeres are chains of repeating molecules that protect the ends of chromosomes from damage. Given results from earlier studies, some researchers believed telomeres could be a telling indicator of aging, as chains got shorter over time and in response to stressors. But in examining data from white, Latina/o/x and Black older adults, Brown found that while telomere length might be an indicator of aging in mice models and small, non-diverse samples of humans, the same wasn’t true for the diverse community: In samples of older adults that included Black and Latina/o/x sub- groups, telomeres tended to be longer in older adulthood and possibly across the life course.
In work like this, and with Black mental health, Brown tries to allow “the data to speak in the way that it’s showing up,” she says. “And instead of just throwing those findings away, I published them an effort to show that there are things that don’t follow the traditional ideas of what we think Black health and data among Black people should look like.”
To add to her ability to analyze and apply data, Brown has applied for and received a grant to train in genomic and genetic analysis, adding hard science skills to her social scientist’s portfolio, as she tries to more deeply understand the impact of stress, race and racism on health at the molecular level.
Assistant Professor Lauren Brown (center) with lab members Leilani Benton ’27, Heaven Stewart BS/MS ’25, Tavia Roache MAMG ’25 and Amor Mathershed ’24, MSG ’26
The Linked Fate Data Collective
Brown is also working to repair science’s racial assumptions by creating the Linked Fate Data Collective. “One principle of the work that I do is the data is publicly available and accessible to anybody who desires to do the work,” she says. “And if I’m creating new data, that data is also going to be publicly accessible, so others can explore and use the data in ways that work for them.”
The name “Linked Fate” came out of an understanding in Black communities—especially when it comes to voting patterns—that each life is connected to those around it and to that of the Black population as a whole, she says. “We’re voting based on the idea that our fates are all linked in some shape or form,” she says. “You can think of that in terms of data and how one individual can magnify their voice in terms of a data collective.”
But the collective feature does more than that, she says. It’s also meant to dismantle assumptions about hierarchy and to challenge the presumption that only scientists in a lab might have a right to use data, she says. “I don’t want to intimidate folks from being able to take part in this collective, because the idea is that it would include invested activists, scholars, students—anybody who’s interested in experiencing or expanding their data science tools,” she says. “Ideally, the work is coming from the bottom up, rather than from me down.”
Critically to Brown, her hope is that data science will one day be less “extractive,” she says, and more partnership-based with study participants. For example, she says, “potentially, we could all own and decide who uses our genetic sequence and how, and potentially get paid for it, if, say, you have Alzheimer’s disease in the family and you want your DNA to be included in certain studies related to dementia.”
The Next Generation of Diverse Researchers
At the moment, there are few researchers of color doing the kind of work she’s doing, Brown says. “It can be isolating and really hard to find your community,” she says.
Brown wants the collective to offer spaces for students of color who would like to become researchers on aging themselves.
“They can show up if they’re interested and learn what I know,” she says. “Training this next generation is really something that’s important for me to do, to cultivate a space that destigmatizes STEM education for diverse student populations and ensures the visibility of Black and Brown people via data and storytelling.”
