The Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America (NLCHDD) is an interdisciplinary group of scientists at the forefront of research on the social determinants of US population health and health disparities.

Adult health and longevity in the United States lag well behind other wealthy countries. Despite widening recognition of this crisis, we have only a limited understanding of its causes and few strategies to reverse them. Importantly, the level and nature of this crisis varies across geographic contexts.

The NLCHDD brings together emerging and established scholars from a broad range of disciplines and supports activities aimed at generating new evidence to better understand the trends and disparities in U.S. adult health and longevity across the life course and in geographic context. The primary purpose of the NLCHDD is to further develop the scientific groundwork, human capital, and data and analytic infrastructure to answer critical questions about the U.S. health crisis. The network accomplishes this objective by building a consortium of researchers with expertise in the determinants of health and mortality across the life course, a wide range of explanatory pathways and mechanisms (psychological, behavioral, and biological), and multiple levels of geographic context.