Left to right: Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has renewed two grants, each worth $1.9 million, for research networks led by Maxwell School sociology faculty Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat and several external collaborators.
For the first grant, Montez, University Professor and Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, is a co-principal investigator and Monnat, professor of sociology and Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, is a co-investigator.
Monnat is a co-principal investigator on the second grant. The NIA, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will fund both grants for five years, and the $3.8 million total will be shared across multiple institutions involved in the projects.
The first grant renews funding for the Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America, which has been funded for the past 10 years. Montez and Monnat are joined on the network leadership team by Jennifer Ailshire and Julie Zissimopoulos from the University of Southern California, Sarah Burgard and Grace Noppert from the University of Michigan, and Taylor Hargrove and Barbara Entwisle from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The interdisciplinary network of over 100 scholars seeks to accelerate research that will help explain the worrisome trends in U.S. adult health and longevity in recent decades and explain why those trends are most troubling in certain states and local areas.
The second grant will fund the Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging, which was launched five years ago. Its purpose is to advance research on the factors affecting the health and well-being of rural working-age and older adults within the context of prevailing demographic trends, slow-moving macro-level stressors, and contemporary public health and environmental shocks. Monnat’s collaborators include Carrie Henning-Smith from the University of Minnesota, Leif Jensen from the Pennsylvania State University, John Green from Mississippi State University, and Lori Hunter from the University of Colorado Boulder.
“We are grateful for the National Institute on Aging’s continued support, which not only advances crucial research into U.S. adult health and longevity but also affirms the leadership and scholarship of professors Monnat and Montez,” says Shana Kushner Gadarian, associate dean for research and professor of political science at the Maxwell School. “Their findings will no doubt help inform national and regional population health policy.”
Past research on mortality and health by Montez and Monnat has been supported by the NIA and other organizations. They are principal investigators on the NIA’s 2023 Midlife Health and Mortality grant, a five-year, $1.8 million award to examine how state policies and counties’ economic conditions since the 1980s have influenced adult psychological well-being, health behaviors and mortality.
Monnat is also principal investigator on a $2 million COVID-related grant funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with Montez, Douglas A. Wolf and Emily Wiemers as co-investigators. Wolf and Wiemers are professor emeritus and associate professor, respectively, in Maxwell’s Public Administration and International Affairs Department.
Montez is the director of the NIA-funded Center for Aging and Policy Studies (CAPS), co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health (P3H) Lab, a faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute (ASI), and a research affiliate in the Center for Policy Research and the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health.
Monnat is the director of and senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research, co-director of the P3H Lab, Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, and a research affiliate in ASI and CAPS.
Story by Michael Kelly
