Appendix B

Biographies of Planning Committee Members

ROBERT A. HUMMER (Chair, he/him/his) is Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Prior to moving to UNC-CH, he was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He served as 2021 president of the Population Association of America and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023. Hummer’s research focuses on the accurate description and more complete understanding of population health and mortality patterns and trends in the United States. He currently serves as director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which is currently in its sixth wave of data collection. Hummer earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Florida State University. He previously served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Population and was a member of the Committee on Rising Midlife Mortality Rates and Socioeconomic Disparities and the Workshop Planning Committee for Population Health Science in the United States: Trends, Evidence, and Effective Policy.

JENNIFER AILSHIRE (she/her/hers) is professor of gerontology, associate dean of research, and associate dean of international programs and global initiatives at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California (USC). Her research has demonstrated the importance of physical and social environments, and their interactions, in determining health and well-being across the adult life course. Ailshire’s

current projects focus on the role of air pollution and neighborhood social stressors in cognitive and epigenetic aging in older U.S. adults. She is the architect of the Contextual Data Resource (CDR), which can be linked to longitudinal studies of aging in the United States to facilitate examination of socioenvironmental determinants of health and aging. She is currently expanding the CDR for researchers interested in understanding the role of the exposome in dementia and risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease related dementias. Ailshire co-directs the USC/University of California, Los Angeles’s Center on Biodemography and Population Health and the Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias Resource Center for Minority Aging Research. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology, with a specialization in demography, from the University of Michigan. Ailshire is currently a member of the National Academies’ Workshop Planning Committee on Aging in Place, the Physical Environment, and Dementia Friendly Communities.

HECTOR M. GONZÁLEZ (he/him/his) is a professor of neurosciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is a population neuroscientist and the principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging (NIA)-funded Study of Latinos-Investigation of Neurocognitive Aging whose goals are to discover sociocultural, cardiovascular, and genetic risks and resilience factors for Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias among diverse Latinos. González’s primary research expertise is in examining modifiable health and sociocultural factors related to healthy cognitive aging, and unhealthy cognitive aging, impairment, and disorders among diverse Hispanics/Latinos at the population level. He also leads a research program based on the life course research framework for cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease among diverse U.S. Latinos to leverage this deeply phenotyped and genotyped representative cohort. González also serves on the advisory boards of several NIA-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers and studies. He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Alliant International University. González is currently a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Research Priorities for Preventing and Treating Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias.

JENNIFER J. MANLY (she/her/hers) is associate professor of neuropsychology at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University. Her research on cultural, medical, and genetic predictors of cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease among African Americans and Hispanics has been funded by the NIA and the Alzheimer’s Association. Manly aims to improve the diagnostic accuracy of neuropsychological

tests when used to detect cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease among African American and Hispanic elders. She has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, San Diego, and completed her graduate training in neuropsychology at the San Diego State University/University of California, San Diego joint doctoral program in clinical psychology. After a clinical internship at Brown University, Manly completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. She is currently a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Population; the Workshop Planning Committee on Aging in Place, the Physical Environment, and Dementia Friendly Communities; and the National Academy of Medicine.

JACQUELINE TORRES (she/her/hers) is an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her research focuses on policy, societal, and family-level determinants of midlife and late life health and health inequities. Torres’s current research focuses on policy-modifiable social determinants of midlife and late life cognitive aging and dementia risk factors, often with a focus on how these factors operate through family dynamics (e.g., caregiving, the intergenerational transmission of resources). She currently leads two National Institute on Aging-funded R01s, including one focused on how the socioeconomic resources of adult children shape health outcomes for older parents and another that examines social and environmental determinants of midlife health inequities among immigrant women living in an underserved agricultural region of California. She also is multiple principal investigator of an NIA-funded Research Program Project Grant to improve the evidence base on modifiable dementia risk factors. Torres has received the Matilda White Riley Early Investigator Award from the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research. She received her Ph.D. in public health from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and UCSF.

ATHEENDAR S. VENKATARAMANI (he/him/his) is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, a staff physician at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and the director of the Penn Opportunity for Health Lab. He is a health economist who studies how social and economic factors and policies affect health and well-being throughout the life course. Venkataramani’s research combines insights from economics, public health, and clinical medicine, employing a range of descriptive and quasi-experimental approaches. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and winner of early and mid-career awards from Academy Health and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. Venkataramani received his

M.D. from the Washington University School of Medicine and Ph.D. in health policy (economics) from Yale University, and he completed his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.