Meet the Research Team

Jim is the founding director of the Americans’ Changing Lives study and Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology, Sociology, Public Policy and of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. Over his long research career, he has focused on social and psychological factors related to health and illness, such as work-related stress, social support, and health inequalities in aging. Using information from the ACL study, Jim has written a book on the importance of focusing on social and economic policies to promote healthy aging.

Dr. Hicken is the wave six director. Dr. Hicken is an epidemiologist who has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the sources of racial health inequalities. Much of her work has been on the role of environmental hazards such as air pollution and heavy metals such as lead. Furthermore, through her research, we have a clearer understanding of the vulnerability that socially disadvantaged groups experience to environmental hazards. By adding information from the 2019 ACL interviews along with the home visits, Dr. Hicken will study how our neighborhood context over the course of our adult lives can impact healthy aging. In particular, she will examine how neighborhood context can change certain small molecules that attach to DNA (a field of study call “epigenetics”). In other words, with the help of ACL, she will examine how our neighborhoods can change the molecules in our bodies!

Erin is a sociologist and survey researcher interested in the caregiving that people perform across their lives. As the study manager, she will oversee the data collection process and coordinate the work of the study team members.

Kelly is an epidemiologist with substantial expertise in epigenetics. Her research looks at the environmental and genetic causes of neurological disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer’s Disease. She will be taking the epigenetic information that ACL participants provide and creating the measures of “epigenetic patterns”. The research team will take this information and link it to the neighborhood and interview information to examine how neighborhoods affect the epigenetic molecules in our bodies.

Dr. Elliott is a biostatistician and survey methodologist with over a decade of experience working with the Americans’ Changing Lives study, including the development of the analytic weights and the imputation of missing data for the project. For this project, Dr. Elliott will assist with the design of the ACL-LIFE life history instrument, assist with all statistical analyses and data imputation

Philippa is a gerontologist with extensive experience investigating the ways in which neighborhood context can promote or inhibit healthy aging. In particular, she has clarified how disabilities are not simply a state of the person, but rather a reflection of the environment. In other words, our environments (like the state of our sidewalks, how safe our neighborhoods are) are a large part of whether we are “able” to conduct our daily lives as we age. Furthermore, she has used the information from ACL to show the importance of our social connections and outlook on life are to our aging process.