Emma Aguila Associate Professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research examines the relationship between socioeconomic status and health, with a focus on how social security and social insurance programs can improve the well-being of vulnerable middle-aged and older adults. Dr. Aguila has extensive experience designing and implementing field experiments and longitudinal surveys. She led a randomized control trial evaluating the impact of a non-contributory pension program in the State of Yucatán, Mexico, and serves as Co-Investigator of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS).
eaguilav@usc.edu | more info
Thalida Em Arpawong Associate Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Her research focuses on how genetic, biological, and social factors interact to shape psychosocial and cognitive health across the life course, with particular attention to risk and resilience processes in aging.
arpawong@usc.edu | more info
Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez Professor of Community Health Sciences and Sociology and the Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research. His research focuses on the demography of health and aging, including health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries, aging in high-income countries (such as compression of morbidity), the links between early life experiences and later life outcomes, and the use of biomarker data from Mexico to explore physiological health patterns and their associations with sociodemographic factors.
beltrans@ucla.edu | More Info
Daniel Benjamin Professor with joint appointments at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the Department of Human Genetics at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. He is a co-founder and co-director of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), a multidisciplinary collaboration between geneticists and social scientists. His research in genoeconomics develops methods for integrating genomic data into the social sciences. His work spans statistical reasoning and decision-making, the measurement of subjective well-being for evaluating public policy, and the identification of genetic variants associated with outcomes such as educational attainment and well-being. His earlier research examined links between economic behavior, cognitive ability, and social identity, including ethnicity, race, gender, and religion.
djbenjam@usc.edu | More Info
Arleen Brown General internist and health services researcher whose work focuses on quality of care for older adults and racial/ethnic minority populations living with diabetes. Her research examines health system, social, and individual determinants of health for people with diabetes, and she has led major projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to evaluate the quality of diabetes care in both fee-for-service and managed care settings.
abrown@mednet.ucla.edu | more info
Judith Carroll George F. Solomon Professor of Psychobiology at UCLA. Her research investigates how behavioral and psychosocial factors such as insomnia, depression, anxiety, and stress influence biological aging processes at both systemic and cellular levels, and how these processes contribute to vulnerability for diseases of aging, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Carroll’s work has been supported by an American Cancer Society Research Scholars Grant to examine biobehavioral influences, including insomnia and depression, on accelerated biological aging in breast cancer survivors.
carrollje@ucla.edu | more info
Brian Finch Senior Social Demographer and Professor (Research) of Sociology and Spatial Sciences at USC. His interdisciplinary research bridges social demography, social epidemiology, and medical sociology to explore health disparities, social genomic influences on population health, and the relationships among social environments, behavior, and well-being.
brian.finch@usc.edu | more info
Caleb E. Finch University Professor and the ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Chair in the Neurobiology of Aging at USC. His research focuses on fundamental mechanisms of human aging, with particular emphasis on inflammation and nutritional influences, the effects of air pollution on aging, and the evolution of the human lifespan and age-related diseases, especially Alzheimer’s disease.
cefinch@usc.edu | more Info
Margaret Gatz Professor of Psychology, Gerontology, and Preventive Medicine at USC. A developmental and clinical psychologist, her research focuses on cognitive aging and behavioral functioning across the lifespan, including longitudinal studies of aging in Swedish twins to understand genetic and environmental influences on cognitive health in later life.
gatz@usc.edu | more info
Dana Goldman University Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy, and Economics at the University of Southern California and the Leonard D. Schaeffer Director of the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service. His research expertise spans health economics and finance, health policy, the role of prevention in healthcare, healthcare reform, pharmaceutical regulation and innovation, precision medicine, and the value of delayed aging.
dpgoldma@usc.edu | more info
Patrick Heuveline Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His research spans demographic and population modeling, the historical and political consequences of demographic change, family and child well-being, and issues of social justice and advocacy.
heuveline@soc.ucla.edu | more info
Andrei Irimia Associate Professor of Gerontology, Quantitative & Computational Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and Neuroscience at USC. A biogerontologist and computational neurobiologist, his research focuses on how genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors influence brain aging and vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). His laboratory uses interpretable deep learning, genomics, and brain imaging to identify and characterize novel risk factors for ADRD. Dr. Irimia also studies accelerated aging, neurovascular calcification, and brain injury as contributors to dementia risk.
irimia@usc.edu | more info
Michael Irwin Norman Cousins Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Professor of Psychology in the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences, and Director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He is a leading expert on psychoneuroimmunology — the study of how psychosocial and behavioral factors influence immune function, health, and disease through neurobiological and immunological pathways.
mirwin1@ucla.edu | more info
Arie Kapteyn Professor of Economics and the Executive Director of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the University of Southern California. His recent applied research focuses on aging and economic decision making, including retirement behavior, consumption and savings, pensions and Social Security, disability, economic well-being in later life, and portfolio choice.
kapteyn@dornsife.usc.edu | more info
Arun Karlamangla Chief of Geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a Professor of Medicine – Geriatrics. He is a clinician-scientist whose research focuses on aging and geriatric care, including the biological and psychosocial determinants of health in older adults, mechanisms of age-related disease, and strategies to improve health outcomes and quality of life in geriatric populations.
akarlamangla@mednet.ucla.edu | more info
Jung Ki Kim Research Assistant Professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She holds a PhD in Gerontology/Public Policy from the University of Southern California and dual master’s degrees in Gerontology and Social Work. Her research expertise spans big data analysis, social determinants of health and health disparities, and biodemography, with a focus on understanding how social and demographic factors shape health and aging outcomes.
jungk@usc.edu | more info
Jinkook Lee Director of the Program on Global Aging, Health, and Policy and Professor (Research) of Economics. She is the PI of LASI-DAD a study of dementia among older Indians. She heads the Gateway to Global Aging and the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC) For AD/ADRD Research.
jinkook.Lee@usc.edu | more info
Adriana Lleras-Muney Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at UCLA. Her research examines the relationships between socioeconomic status and health, with a particular focus on education, income and policy.
alleras@econ.ucla.edu | more info
Mara Mather Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Her research focuses on aging and affective neuroscience, examining how emotion and stress influence memory, decision-making, and cognitive processes in later life.
mara.mather@usc.edu | more info
Heather Elizabeth McCreath Adjunct Professor in UCLA’s Division of Geriatrics whose research focuses on aging, health disparities, and diversity in health research. She is Co-Director of the Data Coordination Core for NIH-funded projects and is affiliated with the USC–UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health.
hmccreath@mednet.ucla.edu | more info
Kathleen McGarry Professor of Economics at UCLA and a Research Associate at the NBER. McGarry’s research focuses on the well-being of the elderly with particular attention paid to public and private transfers, including the Medicare and SSI programs and the transfer of resources within families.
mcgarry@ucla.edu | more info
Arthur Stone Professor of Psychology, Economics and Health Policy and Management. Trained as a clinical psychologist and is currently professor of Psychology and director of the Dornsife Center for Self-Report Science at the University of Southern California. He is also Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University.
arthuras@usc.edu | more info
John Strauss Professor of Economics. Economics of the Household, Human Resource Investments and Labor Market Outcomes, Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.
jstrauss@usc.edu | more info
Arthur Toga Provost Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Radiology, Engineering and Quantitative and Computational Biology. He is interested in the development of new algorithms and the computer science aspects important to neuroimaging. New visualization techniques and statistical measurement are employed in the study of morphometric variability in humans, subhuman primates and rodents.
toga@usc.edu | more info
