Biosocial Aging

Vision Statement

To achieve health across the life course and improve healthy aging by integrating biological and social sciences approaches in research and prevention of age-related declines.

Mission Statement

The mission of the CAC program on Biosocial Aging is to create knowledge that will help inform public health interventions designed to address health across the life course and promote healthy aging. This program supports interdisciplinary collaborations focused on identifying and studying the social and biological processes that impact healthy aging. While the program supports research on a range of exposures and health outcomes, current research foci include biological aging, cognitive and physical functioning, health disparities, psychosocial stressors, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD related dementias, and infectious diseases. The program faculty members conduct cutting-edge research and provide interdisciplinary research opportunities for students, post-docs, and other trainees. Projects in the program area aim to identify and create novel biomarkers and link these data with social sciences approaches for studying the pathways and mechanisms linking social exposures and health outcomes of interest across the life course.

Located in the CAC, the program on Biosocial Aging draws upon the many institutional strengths at Columbia University and will create synergies, including cross-cutting activities that will bring together work across existing centers and initiatives, including health disparities, aging, genomics, infectious diseases, and data sciences.

The Biosocial Aging program in the CAC has three focal research areas:

1. Conducting interdisciplinary research across public health, social sciences, clinical research, and biomedical sciences.
2. Mapping out and determining the biosocial pathways across the life course, emphasizing aging-related health conditions, biological aging, AD/ADRD, infectious diseases.
3. Collaborating with intervention researchers to inform multi-level approaches for preventing disease.

The Biosocial Aging program will encourage and support the collaboration and harnessing of existing epidemiological or social science data sources and links with biospecimens from large scale longitudinal studies, biospecimen and clinical repositories, and administrative health care databases for testing and adding new biomarker data and utilizing big data approaches to bring together cells to society research efforts. These projects will provide opportunities to expand research across a range of clinical and population studies at Columbia University.