CUIMC Healthy Aging Initiative
Vision Statement: Our common goal is to extend healthspan to the oldest ages and create healthy longevity for all. To achieve this goal, we will forge a comprehensive understanding of healthy aging through new discoveries and their integration into universal prevention and care. This will unleash the potential of our longer lives for individuals and society.
The CUIMC Healthy Aging Initiative (CHAI) was launched in 2023 and located within the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. The Initiative was established with the following goals.
- Create a vision for next generation science to propel developing healthy longevity for all— spanning basic molecular, cellular, and organismal, clinical, mental health, social sciences, and public health approaches to population health
- Identify initiatives to catapult CUIMC’s leadership on science and solutions that meet health needs and optimize the opportunities of longevity
- Identify CUIMC’s strengths and gaps and our collective transformative goals that will strengthen basic science, clinical medicine, social science, and population health science, and position CUIMC as a transformative leader on aging, longevity and health
- Create a basis for synergies among all these disciplines towards transformative goals
- Propel collaboration among the medical center’s four schools and the Irving Institute towards a shared and highly aspirational vision
Second Round | Apply Here for CHAI Pilots
To apply for CAC's CHAI Pilot Awards to Advance Measurement of Healthy Aging, please go to the form at the link below. Our Spring 2026 round of pilot grants is designed to foster innovations in measurement science that will inform a next generation of cohort studies to understand the etiology and course of healthy aging. We welcome proposals from all branches of science and from across the Columbia University community. Responsive proposals will develop and/or validate novel measurements of healthy aging, including population-level measures, survey scales, psychometric assessments, physical and cognitive performance tests, biochemical assays, composite indices, and/or methods to collect data or biospecimens.
Amount: Each award is $33,000. We anticipate that three awards will be given.
Eligibility: Assistant, associate, and full professors across Columbia University schools are eligible to apply.
Dates: The deadline to submit your proposal is Wednesday, July 8, 2026, 5pm ET. Grant period will begin on October 1, 2026.
Details and submission portal may be found at this link.
Contact: Emma Kaishian at ek3138@cumc.columbia.edu.
First Round | CHAI Pilot Grants Awarded November 2024
On November 18, the CHAI Steering Committee, chaired by Dean Linda P. Fried, announced four interdisciplinary CUIMC teams that will receive the healthy longevity pilot awards. Dean Fried acknowledged the hard work of the CHAI Steering committee and selection committee co-chairs Ian M. Kronish, Florence Irving Associate Professor of Medicine and Associate Director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health; and Muredach P. Reilly, director, Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research.
The goal of this pilot funding program is to foster interdisciplinary innovation in the science of healthy longevity by CUIMC researchers. More specifically, the funds are intended to help scientists overcome barriers and gaps to launching programs of research on healthy longevity by catalyzing the creation of new teams; the aim is to encourage not only existing aging researchers to work on this mission, but also to attract established investigators to focus for the first time on healthy longevity. The long-term goal is to advance our understanding of the drivers of healthy aging and potential interventions to amplify it. Healthy longevity is defined as added years of life lived free of disability.
The 2024 CHAI Pilot Award recipients are:
- Marcela Tamayo-Ortiz, ScM, ScD, Sarah Tom, PhD, MPH & Rebecca Kehm, PhD | The Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) Mothers PATHWAY Initiative: Pregnancy to Aging Through Health and Wellbeing Assessment across the Years.
- Daniel W. Belsky, PhD & Vivek Moitra, MD | Quantification of Biological Aging in Electronic Health Record Data for Precision Prognosis in ICU Patients
- Jae-eun Miller, PhD & Yueqing Peng, PhD | Keeping Time: Promoting Healthy Aging by Resetting the Circadian Clock
- Yvon Woappi, PhD & Cathy Mendelsohn, PhD | Investigating the Contribution of Wound Memory on Aging-related Epithelial Dysfunction
Read the full announcement.
CHAI Healthspan Extension Summit Unites Medical Campus
By 2050, the number of people aged 80 years or older is expected to triple. Society now faces the challenge of optimizing our longer lives by extending our “healthspan”—defined as years of life lived free of disease and disability. To address this challenge, on April 19, 2024, CHAI's Healthspan Extension Summit brought together researchers from across the medical center to present findings in basic science, clinical medicine, and public health, and to discuss how these fields can ensure healthier long lives. It drew over 300 members of the research community to the Vagelos Education Center for an afternoon symposium which included three scientific sessions and a reception where 70 researchers presented posters. Read more.
Read the 2023 Healthy Aging Initiative preliminary report.
CHAI and the Columbia Aging Center Launch the Geroscience Computational Core
Daniel W. Belsky, PhD, Director
A joint CUIMC-Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center investment has brought about a new core resource based at the aging center, the Geroscience Computational Core (GCC). In its mission to serve the medical campus, the creation of the GCC responds to faculty infrastructure requests. Building off of the success of Columbia Mailman's biostatistics and exposomics core resources serving all of CUIMC, the GCC is a shared resource to catalyze new projects and discoveries in the science of aging across CUIMC. CUIMC studies to address aging and age-related disease face a rapidly evolving scientific landscape. The emerging field of Geroscience, the translation of aging biology to prevent and treat chronic disease, has reshaped priorities at the National Institute on Aging and throughout NIH. To remain competitive, investigators must know how to present their studies within a Geroscience framework, what measurements must be included for this framing, and how to generate those measurements within existing data resources or proposed data collections. The GCC provides a local platform to advise investigators on the emerging field of Geroscience and its state of the art theoretical models, biomarkers, and methods of analysis and deliver instrumental support for measurement and analysis of cutting-edge aging biomarkers across population and clinical study designs. For more information, visit this page.
CHAI Steering Committee Members
Linda P. Fried MD, MPH
CHAI Steering Committee Chair
Dean and DeLamar Professor of Public Health
Mailman School of Public Health
Director, Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Senior Vice President, Columbia University Medical Center
Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia Aging Center
Department: Epidemiology
Allison E. Aiello, PhD
James S. Jackson Healthy Longevity Professor in Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health
Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Department: Epidemiology
Gregory L. Alexander, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FIAHSI
Helen Young CUPHSONAA Professor of Nursing
School of Nursing
Department: Nursing Scholarship & Research
Daniel W. Belsky, PhD
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health
Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Department: Epidemiology
Alan A. Cohen, PhD
Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences
Mailman School of Public Health
Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Department: Environmental Health Sciences
Gérard Karsenty, MD, PhD
Paul A. Marks M.D., Professor
Chair of the Department of Genetics and Development
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Department: Genetics and Development
Ian M. Kronish, MD, MPH
Associate Director, Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health
Florence Irving Associate Professor of Medicine
Co-Director, ColumbiaDoctors Hypertension Center
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health
Department: Medicine
Carol Kunzel, PhD
Professor of Foundational Sciences (in Dental Medicine)
Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
College of Dental Medicine
Department: Section of Oral, Diagnostic, and Rehabilitation Sciences
José A. Luchsinger, MD, MPH
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Vice Chair for Clinical and Epidemiological Research
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Department: General Internal Medicine
Jennifer J. Manly, PhD
Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain
Department: Neurology
Emmanuelle Passegué, PhD
Director, Columbia Stem Cell Initiative
Alumni Professor of Genetics and Development (in Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine)
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Department: Genetics and Development
Muredach P. Reilly, MBBCh, MSCE
Director, Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research
Department: Medicine
Christiane Reitz MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain
Department: Neurology
Scott A. Small, MD
Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology
Director, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
Departments: Neurology, Psychiatry, Radiology
Yousin Suh, PhD
Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Reproductive Sciences in Obstetrics and Gynecology
Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Departments: Obstetrics and Gynecology, Genetics and Development