News Release

IOA Announces Winners of 2007 Gordon H. DeFriese Awards

April 5 , 2007

The UNC Institute on Aging is pleased to announce the 2007 winners of the Gordon H. DeFriese Career Development in Aging Research Awards. These annual awards honor Dr. DeFriese's thirty-year distinguished career in the conduct and development of research to improve the quality of lives of older North Carolinians, and especially his unwavering commitment to developing and supporting the careers of his colleagues. The awards are given to one junior faculty/staff member and one doctoral student from UNC Chapel Hill who demonstrate commitment to and outstanding promise in aging research.

Kelly S. Giovanello, PhD, is this year's faculty/staff awardee. Dr. Giovanello is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a Research Scientist with the Biomedical Research Imaging Center. Her research combines behavioral, patient-based, and functional neuroimaging approaches to investigate the cognitive neuroscience of human learning, memory and aging. She has received a Predoctoral National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health to study associative recognition memory in amnesia, and a Postdoctoral National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Aging to study age-associated non-selective neural activations. She has been actively publishing on aging-related cognition and memory in the neuropsychology journals and has made numerous invitational lectures across the country at university psychology departments and at national conferences. She also serves as an instructor and mentor for undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Giovanello obtained her PhD in neuroscience from Boston University School of Medicine where she received the Carol A. Biber Award of Boston University for excellence in dissertation research and the Henry I. Russek Student Achievement Award. She has completed several training fellowships including a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Other honors include the Laird Cermak Award from the Memory Disorders Research Society and the Nelson Butters Award for Scholarship in neuroscience from the Massachusetts Neuropsychology Society.

Tyson Brown, MA, is this year's doctoral student awardee. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a predoctoral fellow at the Carolina Population Center. He has been awarded several National Research Service Fellowship Awards to support his doctoral training. In addition, he has received scholarships from the AARP Andrus Foundation and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). Mr. Brown’s dissertation research draws on life course themes, longitudinal data and latent trajectory models to investigate racial/ethnic differences in wealth and health trajectories. His broader research and teaching interests encompass life course and aging stratification; population; marital histories; racial and ethnic inequalities; health and wealth trajectories; and research methods. He has participated as a fellow in the Rand Summer Institute on Demography & Economics of Aging, and two University of Michigan ICPRSR Summer Programs to study Group Based Models of Developmental Trajectories and Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Family Data. Mr. Brown has a recent publication in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development, and he has made numerous presentations at aging and sociology conferences at the state and national level. Mr. Brown received his BA and MA in sociology with minors in gerontology and statistics at the University of Florida. Upon expected completion of his doctorate in 2008, Mr. Brown will pursue a post-doctoral traineeship and plans a career as a professor of sociology.

Congratulations to both recipients! The award ceremony will be held at the 2008 Aging Exchange. More information on the Gordon H. DeFriese Career Development in Aging Research Awards, including past winners, is available on our web site.