UIC Receives $2M to Improve Health of Older Adults

The National Institute on Aging has awarded the University of Illinois at Chicago a $2 million grant to improve the function and quality of life of older minority adults.

The five-year award supports UIC's Midwest Roybal Center for Health Promotion and Translation, which fosters improvement in health behavior among older adults through scientifically sound, cost-effective programs. The center has been continuously funded by the NIA since 1998.

Susan Hughes, professor of community health sciences and co-director of IHRP’s Center of Research on Health and Aging, directs the UIC Roybal Center.

The Roybal Center award will be used in part to support preliminary studies of health promotion in older African American and Hispanic adults. Thus far, four studies will be supported over the next two years with $50,000 pilot grants:

• Translating Fit and Strong! for Older Latinos, by Cheryl DerAnanian, a former UIC post-doctoral fellow in the Gerontological Public Health Training Program who is now a faculty member at Arizona State University
• Translating Strong for Life into the Community Care Program, directed by Thomas Prohaska, professor of community health sciences and co-director of the Center for Research on Health and Aging
• Project WEL: Walking & Environment in Older Latinos, directed by David Marquez, assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition
• Stress Reduction with Tai Chi for Elderly Hispanics with Diabetes, directed by Amparo Del Castillo, training director of the Midwest Latino Health Research, Training and Policy Center

Additional pilot studies will be supported by the grant after a formal proposal review process.

The UIC Roybal Center also received supplemental funding from the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research to support an additional pilot study in each of the first two years of the grant. Studies funded by this supplement will focus on health promotion for adults who are aging with a pre-existing disability.

The UIC Roybal Center is one of 12 such centers funded by the NIA in September, including those at Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton Universities as well as the Rand Corporation. The UIC center is the only Roybal Center in the Midwest.

Authorized by Congress in 1993, the NIA's Roybal Centers Program is named after Edward R. Roybal, a former chair of the House Select Committee on Aging. The program is designed to move promising social and behavioral research findings out of the laboratory and into programs, practices, and policies that will improve the lives of older adults and the ability of society to adapt to an aging population.