People

Peifeng “Perry” Hu Geriatric Clinician-Scientist. His areas of research include; Allostatic Load/Biological Aging, Cardiac Risk Factors, Cardiovascular Disease, Community-based Participatory Research, Diet, Inflammation ,Socioeconomic Status and Health.
phu@mednet.ucla.edu | more info

Julie Zissimopoulos Professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. In addition to her faculty appointment, she is Senior Scholar, Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government. She serves as Principal Investigator and Director of USC’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementia Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (USC AD/ADRD RCMAR) and Center for Advancing Sociodemographic and Economic Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (CeASES ADRD), both focused on advancing research to reduce burden of AD/ADRD and funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
zissimop@usc.edu | more info

Jennifer Ailshire is a co-Director of the Research Resources and Dissemination Core. She is a Professor of Gerontology whose research focuses on the importance of the neighborhood environment and social relationships in determining health over the life course.
ailshire@usc.edu | more info

Pinchas Cohen Professor of Gerontology, Medicine and Biological Sciences; Dean, USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology; William and Sylvia Kugel Dean’s Chair in Gerontology; Executive Director, Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center. He received numerous awards for his research, including a National Institute of Aging “EUREKA”-Award, the NIH-Director-Transformative RO1-Grant, and the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He holds several patents for novel peptides and is the co-founder of CohBar, a biotechnology company developing mitochondrial peptides for diseases of aging. Cohen has published over 300 papers in top scientific journals focusing on aging, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, growth hormone/IGF-biology and the emerging science of mitochondrial-derived peptides, which he pioneered.
hassy@usc.edu | more info

Steven Cole Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences. Cole’s research utilizes molecular genetics and computational bioinformatics to analyze the pathways by which social and environmental factors influence the activity of the human genome, as well as viral and tumor genomes. He pioneered the field of human social genomics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_genomics) and supports a world-wide array of research programs in his role as director of the UCLA Social Genomics Core Laboratory.
coles@ucla.edu | more info

Emma Aguila Associate Professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public of Policy. Her research focuses on interrelation between socioeconomic status and health and how social security and social insurance programs can help improve health and well-being for 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 analyzing the impact of a non-contributory pension program in the State of Yucatan, Mexico. She is Co-Investigator of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) survey in Mexico.
eaguilav@usc.edu | more info

Thalida Em Arpawong is a Research Assistant Professor of Gerontology at USC. Her research interests revolve around disentangling how risk and resilience processes combine to influence psychosocial and cognitive health throughout aging.
arpawong@usc.edu | more info

Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez Professor, Community Health Sciences & Sociology, and Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research. Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez’s research focuses on the demography of health and aging. He has written on health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries; on aging in high-income countries including issues about compression of morbidity; on the links between early life experiences and late life outcomes; as well as on biomarker data from Mexico to study physiological patterns of health and their link with sociodemographic factors.
beltrans@ucla.edu | More Info

Daniel Benjamin Tenured professor with joint appointments at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the Human Genetics Department at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. He is a co-founder and co-director of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, a multidisciplinary enterprise that provides a platform for collaboration between geneticists and social scientists. His research on genoeconomics develops tools for incorporating genomic data into the social sciences.Benjamin’s research topics include: understanding errors people make in statistical reasoning; exploring how best to use survey measures of subjective well-being (such as happiness and life satisfaction) to track national well-being and evaluate policies; and identifying genetic variants associated with outcomes such as educational attainment and subjective well-being. His earlier work addressed how economic behavior relates to cognitive ability and social identity (ethnicity, race, gender and religion).
djbenjam@usc.edu | More Info

Arleen Brown Dr. Arleen F. Brown is a general internist and health services researcher with expertise in quality of care for older adults and minorities with diabetes. She has focused on health care system, social, and individual level determinants of health for persons with diabetes. She had headed a project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on quality of care for older persons with diabetes in fee-for-service and managed Medicare. Dr. Brown was also a co-Principal investigator of a study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine the quality of diabetes care for persons with diabetes in managed care.
abrown@mednet.ucla.edu | more info

Judith Carroll George F. Solomon Professor of Psychobiology at UCLA. Carroll’s research asks how behavioral and psychosocial factors like insomnia, depression, anxiety and stress may operate at the system and cellular level to affect the biological aging process and influence disease vulnerability including cancer, cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases of aging. Carroll was recently awarded an American Cancer Society Research Scholars grant to begin to examine the biobehavioral influences, including insomnia and depression, on accelerated biological aging in breast cancer survivors.
carrollje@ucla.edu | more info

Brian Finch Senior Social Demographer, Professor (Research) of Sociology and Spatial Sciences. His work bridges the disciplinary boundaries of social demography, social epidemiology and medical sociology in order to explore health disparities, social genomics, and criminology and well-being.
brian.finch@usc.edu | more info

Caleb E. Finch University Professor, ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Chair in the Neurobiology of Aging. Finch’s research areas are basic mechanisms in the human biology of aging, with focus on inflammation and nutritional influences, air pollution influences on aging, and evolution of the human lifespan and diseases of aging, especially Alzheimer disease
cefinch@usc.edu | more Info

Margaret Gatz is a Professor of Psychology, Gerontology, and Preventative Medicine at USC. She is a psychologist who has worked on cognitive and behavioral functioning in a longitudinal panel of elderly Swedish twins.
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 areas of expertise are; Health economics and finance, health policy, the role of prevention in healthcare, healthcare reform, pharmaceutical regulation and innovation, precision medicine, and value of delayed aging
dpgoldma@usc.edu | more info

Patrick Heuveline Professor of Sociology. Research areas include Historical and Political Consequences, Family and Child Wellbeing, Social Justice and Advocacy and Demographic and Population Modeling.
heuveline@soc.ucla.edu  | more info

Andrei IrimiaAssociate Professor of Gerontology, Quantitative & Computational Biology, Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience. biogerontologist and computational neurobiologist studying the effects of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors on brain aging. His laboratory uses interpretable deep learning, genomics, and brain imaging to identify and characterize novel risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). He also studies accelerated aging, neurovascular calcification, and brain injury as risk factors for ADRD.
irimia@usc.edu | more info

Michael Irwin Norman Cousins Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; Professor of Psychology, UCLA College of Letters and Sciences; Director, Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, Semel Institute for Neuroscience. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the psychoneuroimmunological pathways by which psychosocial and behavioral factors influence health and disease.
mirwin1@ucla.edu | more info

Arie Kapteyn Professor of Economics and the Executive Director of the Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the University of Southern California. Much of Prof. Kapteyn’s recent applied work is in the field of aging and economic decision making, with papers on topics related to retirement, consumption and savings, pensions and Social Security, disability, economic well-being of the elderly, and portfolio choice.
kapteyn@dornsife.usc.edu | more info

Arun Karlamangla Chief of Geriatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Professor of Medicine – Geriatrics
akarlamangla@mednet.ucla.edu | more info

Jung Ki Kim Research Assistant Professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She has received a PhD in Gerontology/Public Policy at the University of Southern California and dual Masters in Gerontology and Social Work. Her expertise is in Big data, Social-determinants and disparities, Biodemography.
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 Davis School of Gerontology. Her research deals with aging and affective neuroscience, focusing on how emotion and stress affect memory and decisions.
mara.mather@usc.edu | more info

Heather Elizabeth McCreath is an Associate Director in Research Operations Core, Division of Geriatrics at UCLA, and a researcher in Division of Geriatrics, Department of Medicine at UCLA. Her current research interest includes the use of biomarkers in understanding the aging process, the detection of skin damage and pressure ulcers, and alternative care delivery models.
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