Through the center grant from the National Institute on Aging, CDHA provides financial support to affiliates who are developing innovative projects likely to receive federal funding. CDHA invites interested investigators to submit proposals for pilot funding.
2023-2024 Pilot Projects
Environmental Determinants of Premature Aging in Transportation and Construction Workforce
PI: Wan-chin Kuo
This project aims to (1) elucidate the environmental-biological pathways of premature aging in the transportation and construction workforce, (2) predict workers’ 24-hour activities based on the contextual cues identified in the Socio-Ecological Model, and (3) identify Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) strategies incorporating worker-centered care into systems-level changes and workers’ perspectives toward climate change policies. The ultimate goal of this work is to build worker-centered intelligent environments to alleviate health disparities among industrial workers across the nation and the world.
Rent and Mortality in the Metropolitan U.S.
PI: Max Besbris
This study offers multiple improvements in an effort to expand the literature on the relationships between housing and health. Specifically, it will use geographically fine-grained data on rent and changes in rent over a five-year period to estimate the effect of changes in rental housing prices on mortality in the urban U.S. It will (1) examine if rising rents at the county-level are related to increased mortality, (2) identify county-level heterogeneity in the effect of rental prices on mortality, and (3) estimate the relationship between county-level housing cost burden and mortality.
An Overlapping Cohorts Approach to Life Tables
This project constitutes a novel examination of key public health and social policy issues, guided by new analytical methods to study population level mortality patterns. In a manuscript (recently published in Epidemiology, a leading field journal), Arolas present preliminary findings based on an early version of this proposal’s approach and find that current Black-White mortality inequality in the U.S. is over 60% larger than documented by existing evaluations. The next step in this project will explore the implications of this methodology on a variety of key demographic and public health issues, including projects on the relative importance of major causes of death, and cause-related determinants of current trends on lifespan inequalities; this CDHA pilot grant will jump start this large research agenda.