Session chaired by Dr. COHEN

Lecture 1 – “Disentangling the Disabling Process: Insights from the Yale PEP Study”.
Dr. Thomas Gill
Professor of Medicine,
Epidemiology and Investigative Medicine,
Yale University School of Medicine

Dr. Thomas Gill is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Investigative Medicine at Yale University and a leading authority on the epidemiology and prevention of disability among older persons. He received his research training in clinical epidemiology as a Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Clinical Scholar at Yale, and he joined the faculty in 1994 after completing an additional year as a geriatrics fellow. Dr. Gill is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars in Aging Research Award, the RWJ Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award, and the 2001 Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award from the American Geriatrics Society. He holds several leadership positions at Yale, including Director of the Center on Disability and Disabling Disorders, Director of an NIA-funded postdoctoral training program in Geriatric Clinical Epidemiology, Co-Director of the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, and Director of the Research Career Development Core. Dr. Gill’s research and mentoring program is currently supported by an NIA Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research (K24) and two NIA-funded R01s. His research accomplishments have been recognized through receipt of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health and election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI).

Dr. Gill will highlight findings from the Yale PEP Study, a unique and highly innovative longitudinal study of 754 community-living persons aged 70 years or older. PEP participants have completed comprehensive, home-based assessments at 18-month intervals and have been followed monthly via telephone interviews for more than 11 years to reassess their functional status, ascertain exposure to intervening events, and identify admissions to the nursing home and deaths.




Lecture 2 - “Primary Aging, Secondary Aging and Social Context as Influences on Cognitive Ageing Through the Life-Course”
Kaarin J. Anstey, Ph.D.
Professor, Australian National University
Adjunct Professor, Flinders University
National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Research Fellow


Professor Kaarin Anstey completed her doctoral studies in psychology at the University of Queensland in 1997. She continued postdoctoral research at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute and Flinders University. Now based at the Australian National University, Professor Anstey is Director of the Ageing Research Unit at the Centre for Mental Health Research. She leads a team of researchers who work on epidemiological studies focussing on cognitive development and decline, mild cognitive impairment, dementia, mobility and mental health. Professor Anstey is the Principal investigator on the DYNOPTA project which involves analysis of a dataset that has been developed by pooling nine Australian Longitudinal Ageing studies. She is also the current principal investigator on the PATH Through Life Project, an epidemiological study of mental health and cognition from early to late adulthood that is now in its third wave of data collection. Anstey is a member of the Medical and Scientific Panel for Alzheimer’s Australia, and is on the editorial boards of Ageing, Neuropsychology and Cognition, Ageing International, Gerontology, and Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. Professor Anstey has won several research awards including the Chinoin Young Investigator Award from the IAGG for her doctoral research in 1997, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia Early Career Award in 2002, and the Margret Baltes award for research excellence in the Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Gerontological Society of America in 2005.



Reception will follow lecture at 7:00 p.m.