IOA Staff

Mary Altpeter, Ph.D.

Lead, Healthy Aging Program
Senior Scientist

Dr. Altpeter is Healthy Aging Program Lead and a Senior Scientist at the IOA. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Health. She is trained in social work, gerontology and public administration. Her research and research translations interests focus on designing and testing community-level health promotion interventions for older adults, and building infrastructure and provider capacity to plan, implement and evaluate health promotion programming. She joined the Institute on Aging in 1998. She has participated in numerous multi-disciplinary health promotion research and education projects and has published in the areas of evidence-based health promotion for older adults, participatory action research and building community partnerships to address preventive health care for marginalized older adults. Since 2001, she has been an active investigator and PI of the CDC-funded Prevention Research Center NC Healthy Aging Research Network, a member campus of the nine-campus national Healthy Aging Research Network (HAN). The mission of the HAN is to better understand the determinants of healthy aging in older adult populations; to identify interventions that promote healthy aging; and to assist in the translation of such research into sustainable community-based programs throughout the nation. Dr. Altpeter also served as Co-investigator of the CDC-funded three-year project designed to determine whether the Walk with Ease (WWE) program (in group-assisted and self-directed versions) can increase physical activity and fitness levels among adults with arthritis over the long-term (Dr. Leigh Callahan, PI) and currently is Principal Investigator of the “Bringing Walk With Ease to the Workplace” research project funded by the Mid-Atlantic Region Arthritis Foundation.

In addition, Dr. Altpeter has provided evaluation expertise for several health promotion programs implemented in North Carolina, including: the AoA-funded Chronic Disease Self-Management program, the REACH II Caregiving for People With Alzheimer’s Disease Translation Project, and the AoA-funded Innovation Grant to Better Serve People with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders. She is also serving as a consultant to Texas A&M University for an AoA-funded three-year grant to develop a nationwide plan for evaluation of evidence-based health promotion programs.

Dr. Altpeter has extensive experience in community and provider education, working with national, state and county service systems, with a particular interest in accelerating the research knowledge to practice transfer. She serves as a consultant to the National Council on Aging’s Resource Center for Healthy Aging, having co-authored numerous issue briefs on health promotion and aging for providers and is the chief author of nine online interactive self-instructional training modules that are used by grantee states to train staff and partners on health promotion and aging for older adults (available at http://www.healthyagingprograms.org/content.asp?sectionid=156)

Dr. Altpeter also is a consultant to the Carolina Geriatric Education Center and the California Geriatric Education Center. Dr. Altpeter has also served on the National Advisory Panel of the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and as a faculty mentor to the John A. Hartford Foundation Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholars Program. She has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to serve as an international consultant and has provided faculty support and curriculum development expertise to the European Union’s Masters in Gerontology Consortium.

Dr. Altpeter joined the IOA after serving for five years at the UNC-CH Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center as the Program Manager of the NCI-funded North Carolina Breast Cancer Screening Program, an eight-year multidisciplinary community intervention trial targeted at older, rural African American women. Prior to coming to UNC, Dr. Altpeter was Associate Director of the Geriatric Education Center at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and co-PI for an Administration on Aging grant that brought together the aging and alcoholism services systems to plan and implement a comprehensive training curriculum on older adults and alcoholism. She was also the administrator of a large geriatric medicine and dentistry fellowship program, coordinated numerous training seminars and public workshops on aging, and conducted program evaluation on numerous departmental training programs. Dr. Altpeter is the former Director of Training for the New York State Division of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse and the former Co-director of the Title XX-funded Child and Family Services Unit of the Continuing Education Program of the University of New York at Albany School of Social Welfare, a statewide venture serving social service departments in 59 counties in that state.

Email: mary_altpeter@unc.edu