The principal goal of the Hopkins Center on Population Aging and Health (HCPAH) will be to forge a transdisciplinary body of aging research at Johns Hopkins. The HCPAH will promote the development of innovative social and demographic research on aging, strengthen linkages between social, demographic, and biomedical research, and support integrative collaborations across disciplines. The Center's activities will emphasize the development of new research paradigms, new methods of analysis and measurement, and investigators new to aging research. The HCPAH will be effectively a University-wide research center, facilitating collaboration across the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Public Health, Medicine, and Nursing, as well as other academic enterprises. The proposal requests support for three Cores: (1) Administration;(2) Program Development;and (3) Research Dissemination. Pilot research projects supported by the Program Development Core will primarily reflect its core research themes: Aging and Family Change, Disability Measurement, and Biosocial Pathways to Disability. These projects will serve to bring together researchers with common interests from different disciplines, strengthen applications for external funding, and support the development of tools that can be used by other researchers both within the University and in the larger research community. To foster the widespread dissemination of our research results, we also propose to establish a dissemination core that will raise the profile of population based research in aging at Hopkins and distribute new tools and research findings to both the policy and research communities The Center seeks to unite the existing strengths of Johns Hopkins in aging and disability, as well as in demographic research, and foster new interdisciplinary collaborations that go beyond the conventional boundaries of bio-medical and social science research.
An emerging consensus calls for the development of new interdisciplinary research within public health that integrates divergent perspectives, frameworks and methods. The HCPAH will be an interdisciplinary research center that encourages collaboration, forges new ties, and fosters the development of innovative new science spanning the social science and biomedical disciplines
