Members
Related Faculty
Allison Aiello, PhD
Dr. Aiello’s research focuses on identifying the processes by which health inequities in aging emerge across the life course, to uncover points of intervention and improve health equity. She has led numerous studies that have examined whether social inequalities alter biological process at the immunological level to impact health. To pursue this research, she and her epidemiology trainees have developed expertise in a wide range of areas, from immunology, genomics, and applied infectious disease research to aging research, social epidemiology, and population health. Her research program focuses on some of today's most pressing and complex conditions, including biological aging, Alzheimer’s Disease, mental health, and susceptibility to infectious diseases.
Dr. Aiello leads the program on Biosocial Aging and Health Equity in the Robert N Butler Columbia Aging Center. This program supports interaction and collaboration across research projects focused on identifying and studying the social and biological processes that impact healthy aging and enhance health equity.
Daniel Belsky, PhD
The Belsky Lab works on health equity geroscience, the application of insights from the biology of aging to understand and eliminate social inequalities in health. Our efforts involve the development and evaluation of novel methods to quantify biological processes of aging and the application of these methods within longitudinal cohort studies and randomized trials to understand modifiable causes of accelerated biological aging in at-risk populations and to identify interventions that can build aging health equity. Lab website at www.belskylab.com(link is external and opens in a new window).
Belsky is a life-course epidemiologist working in the fields of genetic, genomic, and social epidemiology. He is Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he teaches Life Course Epidemiology and leads the Certificate in Chronic Disease for the Department of Epidemiology. He serves as co-lead of the Children, Youth, and Families Branch of the Columbia Population Research Center, is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Child Brain Development Network, a faculty member of the University of Oslo PROMENTA Center in Norway, and a Senior Researcher at the SocioMed Research Nucleus at the Universidad Mayor in Chile. His work is funded by the US National Institute on Aging (R01AG061378 , R01AG066887, and R01AG073402), the Russel Sage and Jacobs Foundations, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has been an ISI Highly Cited Researcher since 2020.
Within CAC, Belsky leads the Columbia Aging Center Computational Geroscience Core. The Core provides consultation and technical support for the measurement and analysis of cutting-edge biomarkers of aging within clinical trials and observational studies. The Core focuses on composite biomarkers derived from high-dimensional molecular datasets. The goals of the Core are to advance understanding of biological process of aging as modifiable causes of multiple chronic diseases, to elucidate environmental and behavioral factors that affect the pace of aging, and to identify interventions that slow biological processes of aging and extend healthspan.
The overarching goal of Dr. Zeki Al Hazzouri’s research program is to improve the understanding of how social and cardiovascular factors experienced across the life-course influence cognitive function, Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s related dementias (AD/ADRD). An important theme of her work also focuses on causal inference methodologies that address challenges in ADRD research including, inverse probability weighting, trial emulation, and regression discontinuity designs. Her work leverages innovative methods such as pooling, cross-walking and harmonization of existing epidemiological cohorts to address lifecourse ADRD research questions.