CEO Blog

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the largest biomedical research agency in the world — has a new chief officer for scientific workforce diversity, and it’s a member of the GSA community: Marie Bernard, MD, FGSA, FAGHE!

This leadership appointment is well-deserved for someone as experienced and credentialled as Dr. Bernard, who for the last 13 years has served as deputy director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA). If you haven’t done so, read our recent interview with her in the July issue of Gerontology News. You’ll learn why she was the ideal candidate for this position, which reports directly to NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD.

The latest journal impact factors are in, and I’m proud to say that GSA’s journals have reached all-time highs. This is a testament to the hard work and scholarship that the GSA community has produced, from authors to reviewers to editors. Peer-reviewed journals are how fields of inquiry have conversations among themselves, and impact factor is a leading metric we look to gauge success.

GSA’s deep commitment to a caring and competent workforce that supports our aging population was perhaps most visible when it served as a co-founder of the Eldercare Workforce Alliance in 2009. This alliance was formed in response to the landmark Institute of Medicine report “Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce.”

Scientific research in this area continues to develop, and now GSA scholars are in the spotlight again with the latest issue of our journal The Gerontologist, titled “Workforce Issues in Long-Term Care.”

I had the opportunity to showcase GSA’s work on Reframing Aging during a recently convened Age-Friendly Ecosystem Summit hosted by The George Washington University’s Center for Aging, Health and Humanities. The two-day meeting included age-friendly success stories from the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Regional leaders advancing age-friendly programs in the District of Columbia, Montgomery County and Hyattsville, Maryland, and Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia, provided examples of how the many facets of the Age-Friendly Ecosystem are evolving.

GSA has teamed-up with several other organizations to address the challenges presented by the bacterium Clostridioides difficile — or C. difficile as it’s commonly abbreviated. Over the past year, I have had the privilege of representing GSA on the Steering Committee of the C. difficile Awareness Initiative, which was formed in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deeming this infectious disease an urgent public health threat.