Members
Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH
Dr. Fried is a geriatrician, gerontologist and epidemiologist who has led major population-based studies to define opportunities for prevention of cardiovascular disease, multimorbidity, frailty and disability in aging. Her work defining frailty as a clinical syndrome supports the understanding that engagement and activity as one ages is a vehicle to maintaining health across all dimensions, physical, cognition and socioemotional. In the 1990’s she codesigned and co-founded Experience Corps, a senior volunteer program created to demonstrate the immense value of the un-enabled capabilities and social capital of older people in our aging society. Experience Corps is an evidence-based public health program united with senior service, designed with experts in early child development, and offers a novel societal institution that deploys trained older adults as volunteers in public elementary schools in roles created to support the academic success of all children in grades Kindergarten-3. This program demonstrates that societal institutions designed to enable older adults to be generative and to utilize the many capabilities that accrue with age, and to create positive for communities through collective efficacy, offers a vehicle for wellbeing in aging and for thriving of society. Dr. Fried has proposed that the untapped social capital of older people, if enabled in the context of longer health span in older age, could constitute a basis for a Third Demographic Dividend for all ages. Dr. Fried is the co-chair of the recently published U.S. National Academy of Medicine Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity (insert link), offering the blueprint for transformation to successful societies of longer lives.
John W. Rowe, MD
Dr. Rowe, the Julius B Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging, is a geriatrician / gerontologist who has focused his academic work on Successful Aging at the level of the individual and, more recently, societies. In the late 1980’s Dr Rowe formed and led the decade-long MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging an interdisciplinary group of twelve scholars who worked to understand the factors that permit individuals to age successfully. With Robert Kahn, Rowe formulated the Successful Aging concept which has been the basis of substantial research in the field. In 2007 Dr Rowe formed and led the MacArthur Network on an Aging Society which continues to the present and is an inter-disciplinary group of fourteen scholars working together to understand the critical factors that permit societies to adapt to the demographic transformation. As discussed above this work has led to development of an Aging Society Index which quantifies societal progress across key domains. The Index was initially developed for OECD countries and more recently has been extended to over 130 countries. Recent work has elucidated changes in societal adaptation over time, and across the individual States in the US and has examined the relationship between societal adaptation and gender as well as important geriatric issues including depression.