- September 11, 2025
- By Fid Thompson And Gina Driscoll
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has awarded grants totaling up to $5.23 million over six years to launch a pair of University of Maryland-led centers that aim to improve the health of older Americans, at a time when their average age is at an all-time high.
The two centers, with research that span fields including public policy, public health, sociology, economics, psychology, nursing, gerontology, engineering and more, aim to strengthen the university’s reputation as a national hub for interdisciplinary research, training and real-world innovation in the field of aging.
In the School of Public Health (SPH), principal investigator Jie Chen, professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, was awarded $2.59 million to establish the new multi-institutional Center for Seniors Uniting Nationwide to Support Health, Integrated care, and Economics, or Center for SUNSHINE.
Co-led by researchers from SPH and the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB’s) School of Medicine, the center was outlined this month in a study in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. It draws from 50 years of scholarship at the University of Maryland, College Park’s (UMCP's) Center on Aging and the computational innovation and clinical partnerships enabled by the multi-institutional University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing (UM-IHC).
“Our ultimate goal is happy, healthy and well-supported aging for everyone,” said Chen, who also directs the Center on Aging and the Hospital And Public health interdisciPlinarY research (HAPPY) Lab. “The Center for SUNSHINE is about building aging resilience by transforming the systems that shape health and care. Through bold interdisciplinary research, we aim to strengthen care coordination, empower communities, and reimagine the health and social infrastructure needed to support aging across the nation.”
The center will be helmed by Chen with co-leads Rozalina McCoy, associate professor and physician at the School of Medicine and director of the Center for Population Health at UM-IHC, and Stephen Thomas, professor of health policy and management at SPH.
Ten academic units and centers across UMCP are involved in the Center for SUNSHINE, including the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Other academic partners include the Erickson School of Aging Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Georgetown University, Howard University, the Universities at Shady Grove and the University of Maryland Extension.
The center will invest in training and mentoring upcoming scholars who focus on aging resilience and health systems research. It will also support pilot projects led by researchers nationwide, and will offer access to anonymized Medicare claims, electronic health records and geospatial data, along with analytic and modeling support. Funded pilot investigators will receive tailored development resources to advance their research and career trajectories.
In its first year, the Center for SUNSHINE will fund two pilot projects by Shelby Steuart, a UMCP assistant professor of health policy and management, to examine telehealth and behavioral health care for older adults; and Margaret Connolly, an assistant professor of medicine at UMB, to explore access to novel treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“Community engagement is a major focus of the Center for SUNSHINE,” Thomas said. “We are committed to ensuring that older adults and their families are not just ‘human subjects’ of research, but true collaborators in shaping the science, policies and innovations that support healthy aging.”
UMCP is the lead institution for the new Southern Population Aging Research Center (SPARC), supported by a $2.65 million award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). School of Public Policy Professor Katrina Walsemann, Roger C. Lipitz Distinguished Chair in Health Policy, serves as contact principal investigator.
While aging is universal, older adults across the South experience higher rates of chronic disease, shorter life expectancy and limited access to health care and support services.
Walsemann co-directs SPARC with Mieke Thomeer, professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Christine Mair, associate professor of sociology and gerontology at UMBC. Together, they lead a multi-institutional effort spanning a range of disciplines. Within UMCP, SPARC engages faculty across the School of Public Policy, the School of Public Health, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Maryland Population Research Center.
“When I first imagined SPARC, my vision was to bring our three universities together for what each does best,” said Walsemann. “UAB has incredible biomedical and clinical aging research, UMBC is strong in gerontology but smaller in scale, and UMD has deep expertise in population research. By combining those strengths, we’re creating something none of us could do alone—and filling a critical need for aging research infrastructure in the South.”
The center’s work will advance research on critical disparities in aging, focusing on geographic differences; social, economic and environmental determinants; health disparities; and life course pathways shaping aging outcomes with unique emphasis on the specific challenges facing aging populations in the southern U.S. The center is also committed to making its findings useful for policymakers, advocacy groups and communities.
In its first year, SPARC will fund pilot projects by Collin Mueller, a UMCP assistant professor of sociology, to study education, workplace experiences, and dementia risk, and by Myles Moody, a UAB assistant professor of sociology, on how coping resources support well-being among older adults who vicariously experience differential treatment.
SPARC offers a robust slate of programs for faculty and graduate students, including pilot grants for early-stage investigators, monthly speaker series seminars, grant proposal review sessions and skills-focused webinars on topics such as data management and communicating research for policymakers. Faculty will also have access to one-on-one grant advising and data support services.