Advisory Group

The CAA Program Committee was established to provide input from various leading experts in population issues, geriatric service provision, and health care policy and advocacy with respect to Hispanic ethnicity. This committee will play an integral part in planning upcoming conferences.

Emma Aguila, eaguilav@price.usc.edu

Emma Aguila is an Associate Professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public of Policy. She was previously a Senior Economist and Director of the RAND Center for Latin American Social Policy (CLASP). She completed her master’s and Ph.D. in Economics at University College London in the UK. Dr. Aguila has received several awards for her work on social security and pension systems including the Inter-American Award for Research in Social Security, the RAND Gold Merit Award, and the High Impact Research Award from USC Price School. She has publications at Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Science & Medicine, among others. Dr. Aguila has experience conducting field experiments and longitudinal surveys in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Her research focuses on the interrelation between socioeconomic status and health and how different designs of social insurance programs affect retirement, health, and wellbeing of vulnerable middle-aged and older adults.

Flavia Andrade, fandrade@illinois.edu

Flavia Andrade is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also holds appointments in Sociology and Kinesiology and Community Health. She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. Prior to coming to UI, she was a postdoc at the University of Chicago at the Harris School of Public Policy. She has a BA (Economic) and an MA (Demography) from Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and an MS (Population Health) and a PhD (Sociology) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a sociologist with postdoctoral training in public policy, she has been examining health disparities across the life course. In particular, she is interested on how transitions at the population level (e.g. demographic, nutritional, and epidemiological) are influencing health trajectories. Her focus has been on the health of older adults in Latin America and the Caribbean, but she has also extended her studies to focus on Latinos in the US. Over the past decade, she has been involved in several international projects with the ultimate goal of identifying factors that are more malleable to changes through interventions and policies. Her publications appear in journals of population and public health, as well as in book chapters. She has mentored several students and fellows during her career, who have served as collaborators in her projects.

Maria Aranda, aranda@usc.edu

Dr. Aranda is an Associate Professor at the USC Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and Executive Director of the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging. She joined the School faculty in 1995 and holds a joint appointment with the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Dr. Aranda’s research and teaching interests address the interplay between chronic medical conditions, psychiatric disorders, and sociocultural diversity among people from low-income, minority populations. Dr. Aranda has served on several key studies addressing mental health interventions for geriatric and underrepresented populations, psychosocial care of late-life psychiatric disorders, sociocultural adaptations to evidence-based mental health care, and training of interventionists in evidence-based practice. Dr. Aranda served on the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Committee on the Mental Health Workforce for Geriatric Populations which released its final report last year. An advocate for successful aging among older Americans, Dr. Aranda has trained thousands of professionals and graduate students in strengths-based, evidence based practice for older adults and their family members. She has received awards for her mentoring efforts in higher education and for her long-standing efforts to improve community-based services for older Americans.

Elena Bastida, ebastida@fiu.edu

Dr. Bastida is Chair and Professor of the Department of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Robert Stemple College of Public Health and Social Work, Florida International University in Miami. She is Principal Investigator of the Border Epidemiologic Study of Aging (BESA), a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, Institute on Aging. Her research examines diabetes among middle-aged and older adult Hispanics residing along the Texas/Mexico border. In this work, she examines mental and physical health disparities, particularly the effect of immigration on mental health outcomes. She is also investigating the social and economic costs of diabetes and its impact on health care utilization in the United States and Mexico.

Dr. Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez’s research focuses on the demography of health and aging. He has written on health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries; on aging in high-income countries including issues about compression of morbidity; on the links between early life experiences and late life outcomes; as well as on biomarker data from Mexico to study physiological patterns of health and their link with sociodemographic factors. Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez is also Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and co-director of the T32 training grant at CCPR.

With Prof Alberto Palloni (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Dr. Guido Pinto Aguirre, Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez co-founded the Latin American Mortality Database, the largest data repository of mortality from 19 countries in Latin America (including data from around 1850). He has collaborated with researchers and institutions in México, Brazil, Germany, and Sweden.

He received the 2018 Early Achievement Award from the Population Association of America. This award is given biennially in even years to scholars who have made distinguished contributions to population research during the first ten years after receipt of the Ph.D.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA in 2015, Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez was Research Associate at the Center for Demography of Health & Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a David E. Bell Fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University from 2011 to 2013 and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California from 2009-2011.

Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez has published in various journals including: the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS); Nature; Health Affairs; the American Journal of Public Health; the Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Demography; American Journal of Epidemiology; Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health; Salud Pública de México; the Journals of Gerontology (both, Social and Medical sciences) ; the Journal of Aging and Health; Theoretical Population Biology; among others.

Phillip Cantu, phcantu@utmb.edu

Dr. Cantu is a health sociologist faculty member in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Geriatrics, and a core investigator in the Sealy Center on Aging. Dr. Cantu’s current research focuses on caregivers and family members of older adults with dementia. His current research uses data from diverse, population-based cohorts of aging, including the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), the Hispanic Established Population for the Epidemiological Study of the Elderly (H-EPESE), and the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS).

Eileen Crimmins, crimmin@usc.edu

Dr. Crimmins is Associate Dean of Davis School of Gerontology, Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and Sociology. She is currently working on a number of projects. “The Role of Biological Factors in Determining Differences in Health by Education and Income Level” is being undertaken with Teresa Seeman of UCLA. This project examines how aging is linked to markers of biological functioning and how the pace of change in these markers is related to education and income. Factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, homocysteine, antioxidants, fibrinogen, and immune function indicators are among the factors being investigated.
Crimmins also works on Healthy Life Expectancy in the Older Population defining healthy in a variety of ways. In addition she is working on male/female differences in health and mortality as well as differences by gender in life stresses and strains. Crimmins is the director of the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health (CBPH). The purpose of the Center is to integrate medical, biological, and epidemiological information to model and predict population health trends. The Center provides pilot project money for relevant research and supports a series of seminars and workshops on the two campuses.

Martha L. Daviglus MD, PhD, daviglus@uic.edu

Dr. Daviglus is a Professor of Medicine, Director of the Institute for Minority Health Research, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  Her research activities have concentrated on the epidemiology and prevention of cardiovascular diseases and minority health disparities, for which she has received numerous grants and awards including the Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association. Dr. Daviglus has had continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1995 and has been involved in investigating associations of traditional cardiovascular and nutritional risk factors with long-term coronary and cardiovascular morbidity (clinical and subclinical) and mortality in middle-aged and older individuals. Her other research interests focus on the benefits in older age, in terms of health care costs and health-related quality of life and on women’s health. Dr. Daviglus is the principal investigator on a number of longitudinal studies including on the Hispanic Community Health Study/ Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL) Chicago Field Center, the Chicago Healthy Aging Study, and the UIC Cohort of Patients, Family, and Friends. She also serves as Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Research Training Program on Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Prevention.

Carmen García-Peña, mcgarcia@inger.gob.mx

Dr. García-Peña is currently the General Director at the National Institute of Geriatrics in México.   She is an MD with a specialty in Family Medicine, a Master’s degree in Medical Sciences, and a Ph.D. in Public Health and Ageing from the London  School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dr. García Peña is National Researcher level III  (the highest) by the National Council of Science and Technology. She is an active member of the National Academy of Medicine in Mexico, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and, from 2006, an international member of the National Academy of Medicine in the USA. With nearly 200 scientific publications, her research expertise is on aging epidemiology and public health, particularly mental health,  social determinants, and how and why we age as we do. In terms of health policy, she is particularly focused on transforming health services and translating scientific evidence to respond effectively to the health needs of a growing older population.

Hector González, hectorgonzalez@ucsd.edu

Dr. Hector González is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosciences and a faculty affiliate at the Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Diego. He has research interests in neuroepidemiology, including psychiatric epidemiology. Dr. González’ primary research objectives are to determine modifiable risk factors for disability and to develop and implement cost-effect methods for reducing public health burdens, particularly in disadvantaged populations. Since his clinical and research fellowship at the University of California, Davis, Department of Neurology and later as faculty in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology, he has been a co-investigator of the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA). Work in this prospective cohort study of Aging in older Mexican Americans formed his research objectives into research foci on the leading determinants of morbidity facing the U.S. and global populations, vascular disease and depression. Dr. González is pursuing his research agenda as Principal Investigator of several NIH/NIA funded studies to examine neurocognitive aging in Latinos, including the (SOL-INCA).

Luis Miguel F. Gutiérrez Robledo MD, PhD, lmgutierrez@inger.gob.mx

Luis Gutiérrez is founder Director General of the National Institute of Geriatrics, Mexico, DF. Trained as a geriatrician in France where he worked as assistant professor at the University of Grenoble he later on pursued his studies at the University of Paris VII on the Biology of aging. He received his Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of Bordeaux. He has served as head of the geriatric medicine specialty program at the National University of Mexico School of Medicine since 1994. He founded the Department of Geriatrics at the National Institute of Medical Sciences in 1989 and was its Head until January 2009. Dr. Gutierrez’s research agenda focuses on the epidemiology of aging and more specifically on frailty and dementia and the interface between both conditions. He has more than 250 publications among books and scientific papers with an H index of 22. Dr. Gutiérrez is a member of the National Academies of Medicine of Mexico and France, and he has been decorated as “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques” by the French Government. He received as well the Presidential Award from the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics in Seoul, Korea in 2013.

Mary Haan, Mary.Haan@ucsf.edu

Dr. Haan’s primary research interests are in the epidemiology of chronic diseases in aging populations. This involves study of the etiology and natural history of chronic diseases and cognitive and functional impairment across the life course. Her research career has encompassed disease prevention in old age, the etiology of neurodegenerative diseases and the influence of cardiovascular disease on dementia. Her central focus has been on race and ethnicity as factors in explaining the heterogeneity of disease and functioning in aging. As PI for the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA), she is conducting research into the associations between diabetes, dementia and cognitive impairment. This research concerns the influence of cultural, social, psychological, dietary, genetic and biological risk factors on the development of these conditions in older Latinos across the life course. She is interested in inter generational factors that influence the transmission of risk factors and disease. She remains involved in clinical research in women’s health, especially on the influence of hormones on the aging process, gene-environment interactions between estrogen and Apolipoprotein E, and the role of estrogen in preventing cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline. Dr. Haan is the Director of a T32 doctoral training program – “Interdisciplinary Research Training in Aging and Public Health” that promotes cross training in aging and public health.

Terrence Hill, terrence.hill@utsa.edu

Gladys Maestre Professor of Neuroscience and Human Genetics and the Director of the Rio Grande Valley Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (AD-RCMAR) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. Professor Emerita at the University of Zulia at Venezuela. She received her M.D. from the University of Zulia in Venezuela and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and post-doctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She leads the Maracaibo Aging Study as principal investigator since 1998. This is a longitudinal population-based study of dementia and other age-related health problems that has followed more than 2,500 subjects since its inception and has provided important insights about the aging of Latinos. Recipient of numerous awards, and recognized author, the focus of her research is to advance age-related conditions that disproportionately affect Latinos, at the intersection of biomedical, social and behavioral, and implementation sciences.

Carlos Moreno has been a visiting researcher at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego and at the Public Policy and Government Institute at the Universidad de Guadalajara. In the late nineties, he worked as an associate professor at CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas), where he was also appointed Director of the Master Program in Public Policy and Administration. He specializes in heath-care policy, public spending decentralization and local governance in Mexico, with a particular emphasis on performance evaluation. Carlos has been a consultant for several international agencies such as The World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and many other public institutions in Mexico. Since 2005, Carlos is full-time research-professor at ITESO, in Guadalajara.

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Mariana Lopez Ortega, marianalopezortega@googlemail.com

Since November 2009, Mariana Lopez Ortega has been working as a Researcher at the National Institute of Geriatrics, National Institutes of Health, Mexico, where her main line of research has been disability, long-term care, social support for older adults and the social determinants of aging. She has been part of the academic working groups of two national surveys, the latest waves of the Mexican Health and Aging Study, MHAS 2012-2015 and in the development of the module for adults 60 years and older of the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT) 2012. She collaborates with researchers in Mexico as well as in other countries with whom she has published several papers and reports. Within the US, she has collaborations with researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Southern California and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition, she has participated in the production of research and reports with international organizations, such as the Long-term Care in Developing Countries: Ten Case-studies project for the World Health Organization (2003), the International Labour Organisation’s report Long-Term Care Protection for Older Persons: A Review of Coverage Deficits in 46 Countries (2015) and more recently, the 2016 World Alzheimer Report in developing the case study for Mexico. She is currently the PI for Mexico for the project STRiDE (2018-2021), the aim of which is to examine current practice to help people living with dementia to live well, and to ensure that family and other carers do not face excessive costs that could impoverish them or compromise their own health.

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Adriana Reyes, a.reyes@cornell.edu

Adriana Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology who’s research focuses on family demography and health disparities across the life course. Her work aims to understand how family ties provide social capital to help individuals navigate the life course, and how these family ties perpetuate inequalities across race and class. Professor Reyes’ current projects examine race/ethnic differences in intergenerational family relations, the financial and health consequences of living arrangements, caregiving dynamics, and disparities in health trajectories among older adults. She has recently published on changing attitudes towards co-residence in the Journal of Marriage and Family and on the availability of kin to provide caregiving in Demographic Research.

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Fernando Riosmena, fernando.riosmena@gmail.com

Fernando Riosmena is Associate Professor at the Population Program and the Geography Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Associate Director of the University of Colorado Population Center. Riosmena’s research aims at explaining trends and heterogeneity in the chronic and mental health of Latin American immigrants in the United States, examining their status upon arrival, how this health status changes over the immigrant experience as immigrants incorporate in destinations or re-incorporate in sending areas upon returning, as well as for subsequent immigrant generations in the United States. His more recent, ongoing work is particularly interested in understanding the role of immigration and social policies in Hispanic health. In addition, Riosmena’s research aims at improving understanding of the theories, drivers, empirical measurement, and analytical strategies to analyze spatial mobility, with a particular focus on the social, economic, policy, and environmental factors likely influencing international migration between Mexico and the United States.

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Sunshine Rote, sunshine.rote@louisville.edu

As a sociologist with NIA postdoctoral training in Latino aging and health from The Sealy Center on Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Sunshine Rote has the necessary expertise and training to carry out this investigation. Her research focuses on the changing role of the family in the health and well-being of older minorities, especially Latinos, in the United States. She has worked on several projects addressing the complex ways in which social factors affect health and well-being. Specifically, she has received extensive training in trajectory modeling, the proposed methodology for the current project, and have published a study on trajectories of depressive symptoms using the H-EPESE data (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society). In addition, she has published studies with Dr. Angel on areas of risk and resiliency for Mexican American older adults and their family caregivers. The groundwork of the proposed research builds on Dr. Angel’s extensive research on long-term care among the Mexican-origin population and my prior training in Latino health and aging. Dr. Angel and Dr. Rote began collaborating four years ago. In this time, they have worked remotely and successfully completed conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications on issues of health and aging in the Mexican-origin population. Our collaboration has continued into my tenure-track faculty position in the Kent School of Social Work at the University of Louisville. From 2016-2017, she was awarded pilot funding from the University of California at Davis Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) which is NIA funded and supports research on dementia in Latino populations. As a result of this experience, she is aware of the importance of frequent communication among project members and constructing a realistic research plan.

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Rogelio Saenz, rsaenz42@gmail.com

Rogelio Sáenz is Professor in the Department of Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He also is a Policy Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Sáenz has written extensively in the areas of demography, Latina/os, race and ethnic relations, inequality, immigration, public policy, social justice, and aging. He co-authored Latinos in the United States: Diversity and Change and co-edited The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity. Sáenz regularly writes op-ed essays in English and Spanish on demographic, social, racial, and policy issues for a variety of newspapers. In 2018, the American Association for Access, Equity, and Diversity presented Sáenz its Cesar Estrada Chavez Award, an honor that recognizes an individual who has demonstrated leadership in support of workers’ rights and humanitarian issues. In addition, he also was recently recognized as a 2018 Top Latino Leaders by the National Diversity Council.

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V. Nelly Salgado de Snyder, nsnyder@insp.mx

Dr. V. Nelly Salgado de Snyder is former director of Determinants and Challenges of the Health System at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health (INSP). She is a professor and researcher at the INSP where she leads the research line “Health and Vulnerable Groups” and coordinates the Global Health program. She has published over 100 journal articles, books and book chapters about social vulnerability and health, and has conducted research with groups such as undocumented immigrants, elderly, and those living in poverty. She is a member of the Mexican Academy of Scientific Research, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a Fulbright Fellow, and New Century Scholar by the Fulbright Program on Health in a Borderless World. Currently she is on sabbatical leave as a Balzan Fellow at the International Institute for Society and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London.

Dr. Elizabeth Vásquez has a strong interest in expanding scientific knowledge of race and ethnic differences in physical activity and sedentary behavior. Her two interconnected research themes are: (1) Examining physical activity prevalence and its relationship with adverse and positive health outcomes in older adults. (2) Examining the individual-level indicators and the ecological impact of social context which contributes to differential health outcomes in older racial and ethnically diverse populations, in particular Latinos.In addition, Dr. Vásquez is a fellow with the Sustained Training in Aging and HIV Research (STAHR) program and a mentee with the Program to Increase Diversity among Individuals Engaged in Health-Related Research (PRIDE). She is also an affiliated investigator with the Study of Latinos (SOL) and part of the Physical Activity Writing Group and the Aging Writing Group for this project. She is an alumna of the National Institute of Aging Butler-Williams Scholars Program.

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Rebeca Wong, rewong@utmb.edu

Dr. Rebeca Wong is P. & S. Kempner Distinguished Professor in Health Disparities, and Director of the World Health Organization/ Pan American Health Organization Collaborating Center on Aging and Health at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). Dr. Wong’s research agenda focuses on the economic consequences of population aging, particularly in Mexico and among immigrant Hispanics in the U.S. She has completed recent work on lifestyle transitions among elderly in the U.S. and Mexico, poverty and utilization of health services among the elderly, international migration and later old age wellbeing in Mexico, and the impact of the social security reform in Mexico. She served as co-Principal Investigator in the Mexican Health and Aging Study, funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health to locate research on Mexico?s unique health dynamics in a broad socioeconomic context. The study included a national longitudinal survey of multiple purposes among population of middle and old age.

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Emeritus:

Mark Hayward
University of Texas at Austin

Alberto Palloni
University of Wisconsin

William A. Vega, Ph.D.

University of Southern California

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In Memoria: