News Release

Aging Research Retreat Set For UNC Chapel Hill Campus

August 20, 2007
updated August 31, 2007

SAVE THE DATE! A campus-wide aging research retreat will be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday, October 29th, from 1 PM-5:30 PM, in the Bioinformatics Building.

The broad, long-term goals of the retreat are to broaden the reach of aging research across the Chapel Hill campus, and to stimulate interdisciplinary research and proposal development in aging. The intended outcomes of this retreat are:

• To increase campus-wide knowledge of existing research strengths and interests in aging;
• To identify 4-6 areas of aging research in which UNC at Chapel Hill is particularly strong and which show promise to become the focus of one or more large, innovative, interdisciplinary proposals for funding, such as might occur either within or across research and academic units at UNC Chapel Hill;
• To identify mechanisms to facilitate research in the identified areas of actual or potential strength, so as to stimulate interdisciplinary research and proposal development on the campus. Thus, follow-up activities will be planned based on the input from the retreat.

The retreat is being organized at the request of Tony Waldrop, Vice-Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, by a committee under the leadership of Victor Marshall, Director of the Institute on Aging, and Jan Busby-Whitehead, Director of the Center for Aging and Health, UNC School of Medicine. Other members of the planning committee are: Mary Altpeter, Peggye Dilworth-Anderson and Jennifer Craft Morgan, IOA; Mary Palmer, School of Nursing; Jacki Resnick, office of the Vice Chancellor, Research and International Relations; Ned Sharpless, Department of Medicine; Phil Sloane, Co-Director, Center for Aging, Disability and Long Term Care of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research; and Sheryl Zimmerman, School of Social Work.

The program for the retreat will involve some presentations but also working group participation. The program will be announced in the near future. Meanwhile, all researchers on the UNC Chapel Hill campus who are interested in aging or age-related research should reserve the date. We hope for a broad representation of researchers from across the entire campus, including health affairs schools, other professional schools, and the College of Arts and Sciences. In other words, the scope of interest ranges from cell biology and clinical medicine through public health and the social sciences to the arts and humanities.

Invitations will be soon be sent to deans, directors and department chairs, but the primary tool for issuing invitations to faculty and other researchers in aging will be the Aging@UNC Directory. If you are not already listed in that directory, please take a few minutes to create an entry at http://www.uncioa.org/uncaging/.