Katrina M. Walsemann, Ph.D., MPH, University of Maryland
September 16, 2021 | 12:30 – 1:30 PM
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Live webcast and post-lecture Q&A with the speaker.
“Education in the Jim Crow South and Racial Inequities in Cognitive Functioning among Older Adults”
Dr. Walsemann is the Roger C. Lipitz Chair in Health Policy and associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a faculty associate at the Maryland Population Research Center. She received her Ph.D. and MPH from the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and completed a National Institute of Aging (NIA) post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. Dr. Walsemann is a population health scientist with a particular focus on how the U.S. education system shapes individuals’ physical and mental health, independent from and in relation to other structural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. She has published extensively on how early school environments affect health and health behavior across the life course as well as how student debt influences the psychosocial health of young adults and their aging parents. Fundamental to her research is an understanding of the historical and contemporary social policies that can create, reduce, or eliminate social inequities in population health. Her current projects examine the role of state and local educational contexts on cognitive impairment and dementia in older adulthood. The first project, funded by an Alzheimer’s Association (AARG-NTF-20-684252), aims to determine if variation in the timing of state-level school desegregation efforts explain Black-White disparities in cognitive impairment among older adults who grew up in the U.S. South. The second project, funded by the NIA (1R01AG067536-01), examines if educational attainment has differential effects on the risk for cognitive impairment and dementia when education is attained under more (or less) advantaged educational contexts.
Co-sponsored by:
Collaboratory on School and Child Health
Department of Human Development and Family Sciences
Department of Public Health Sciences
School of Nursing
Questions: lectureseries@chip.uconn.edu
The InCHIP Lecture Series is made possible with support from the Office of the Vice President of Research.
About the InCHIP Lecture Series
The InCHIP Lecture Series provides an invaluable forum for researchers – at InCHIP, throughout the UConn community and beyond – to learn about new work in development by leading figures in health behavior change. The InCHIP Lecture Series also provides a venue for researchers to share late-breaking findings and identify emerging trends in health behavior research. For the current semester schedule, visit the InCHIP 2021-2022 Lecture Page.