People

Administration

Douglas A. Wolf, director

Wolf's research addresses the measurement and dynamics of late-life disability, including active life expectancy, and patterns and consequences of informal elder care. He is the PI on two NIA-funded projects (on late-life disability and Medicare-cost trajectories) and an investigator on two others. He has served as acting director of the Population Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (1987-88), director of the Urban Institute's Population Studies Program (1990-1992), and director of Syracuse University's former Center for Demography and Economics of Aging (1994-1999).  Most recently he was interim director of the Center for Policy Research (2008-2009).

Janet Wilmoth, associate director

Wilmoth is currently the director of the Syracuse University Aging Studies Institute. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse University in 2002, she was the associate director of the Purdue University Gerontology Program. Wilmoth is a demographer and sociologist who specializes in social gerontology. She uses nationally representative data and longitudinal data analysis techniques to study later life living arrangements and migration, financial security, and health status. Her current NIA-funded research examines cohort differences in the impact of military service on later life health outcomes.

Kelly Bogart, coordinator, Gero_Ed Summer Workshop

Research Affiliates

Karen Doherty

Doherty is an audiologist in Syracuse University's Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and director of the Hearing Science Laboratory. Her research focuses on speech perception in the hearing impaired, psychoacoustics, and amplification, with a specific interest in aging effects on listeners' ability to process speech in noise. One long-term goal of this research is to improve auditory training programs and hearing aid fitting algorithms for older listeners with hearing loss.

Gary Engelhardt

Engelhardt, an economist, is a TIAA-CREF Institute Fellow and an Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) Fellow. His current research focuses on five areas: the impact of pensions and Social Security on the retirement saving and income security of older Americans; the impact of long-term care insurance on the housing and living arrangements of the elderly; the impact of the adoption of Medicare Part D prescription drug benefits on employer-provided retiree health insurance coverage, consumption, and work decisions of older Americans; the impact of population aging on housing-market behavior; and the economic evaluation of housing and saving policies targeted to low-income households.

Madonna Harrington Meyer

Harrington Meyer, a sociologist , director of the SU Lifelong Learning Institute, and past director of the SU Gerontology Center, conducts research in aging on economic and health policies that affect the older population. She currently focuses on gender, race, class, and marital status inequality in work, welfare state programs, and families. She emphasizes research linked to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and long-term care. Her most recent book (co-authored with Pamela Herd), Market Friendly or Family Friendly? The State and Gender Inequality in Old Age, received the Kalish Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America.

Christine Himes

Himes, a demography and sociologist, works on the demography of aging, obesity and health, and family caregiving. Her recent research focuses on effects of obesity on the recovery from activity limitations, comparative studies of health inequalities in the US and UK, and age patterns of mortality at very old ages. She is a Brookdale Foundation National Fellow and director of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University.

Marc Howard

Howard is a psychologist who studies human memory using a variety of techniques, including experimental psychology, mathematical modeling, and computational neuroscience. His lab's work, funded by an NIH grant, aims to develop a quantitatively satisfactory account of declarative memory that describes cognitive performance and the ensemble response of neurons in the medial temporal lobe. Dr. Howard has frequently collaborated with experts in cognitive aging, using models of memory to provide more refined descriptions of the mnemonic deficit in normal aging and place constraints on models.

William Hoyer

Hoyer, a psychologist, conducts research to understand how individuals gain and retain knowledge. His recent NIA-funded project focused on (2) cognitive control and understanding the factors that affect choice or use of effective strategies during learning, and (2) age-related differences and understanding the factors that constrain and facilitate effective cognitive functioning in different aged adults.

Eric Kingson

Kingson, a professor of social work and founding board member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, examines the distributional effects of changes in retirement age, the consequences of caregiving for women's retirement income security, and intergenerational approaches to policy and programs.

Andrew London

London is a medical sociologist and demographer with interests in HIV/AIDS, mental health, health services and policy research, and welfare reform. He and Janet Wilmoth direct a project focused on the life course consequences of military service, funded in part by an R01 grant from NIA. With collaborators at the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), he is also working to understand the service needs and experiences of older persons with HIV/AIDS.

Jan Ondrich

Ondrich is an econometrician who concentrates on applying discrete choice models and duration models to topics in aging, demography, and labor and urban economics. His initial research on aging addressed the efficacy of community-based long-term services in deterring nursing home use. His ongoing research examines how future prices for housing can be used to determine the probability of retirement. He and Douglas Wolf are developing discrete-mixture models of end-of-life changes in functioning and disability.

Christopher Rohlfs

Rohlfs specializes in public sector applied microeconomics, especially related to the value of a statistical life; cost-benefit analysis; and policies affecting veterans and military affairs. He is currently involved in an NIA-funded project examining air bag usage in automobiles in order to estimate the value of a statistical life and how it varies across age and socioeconomic groups.

Perry Singleton

Singleton is an economist whose work focuses mainly on public and health economics. His recent work examines incentives for health investment, the impact of disability benefits on labor supply and economic well-being, the effect of tobacco taxes on cigarette consumption, and the association between health and family structure.