Healthy Aging Lab
The Study of Healthy Aging in the Circumpolar North
Everyone living in the Circumpolar North should have the opportunity to live a long and healthy life.
However, we live in an environment that can be challenging as we get older. The physical environment may be difficult to navigate (extreme weather, changing climate, high costs of living, etc) but it is important to remember that the social environment also changes for us as we age. As more adults are choosing to age-in-place and retire at home here in Alaska, we are noticing real gaps in our knowledge about what healthy aging means to our elders and how we can achieve it in our Arctic environment.
The Healthy Aging Lab at UAA works to understand the shifting sociocultural landscape for aging adults and identify service needs to facilitate healthy aging-in-place. We do this in a variety of ways, from Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) projects, to community-engaged courses in health sciences, to individual service-learning projects - our work aims to benefit not only the student (and future geriatric workforce), but the senior community as well.
The Healthy Aging Lab attended AARP's "Let's Talk!" discussion on intimacy in older adulthood at the Anchorage Senior Activities Center on February 13, 2019. Pictured here (L to R) are: Katie Davis, Sheila Shinn (former director of gerontology and geriatric initiatives at UAA), and McKenzie Kish.
Check out the "What We Do" page for more information on current and past projects!
The UAA Healthy Aging Research Laboratory is partially supported by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number 2P20GM103395. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official views of Alaska INBRE.