CEO Blog

The important work of the Friends of the National Institute on Aging (FoNIA) is continuing in 2022, and for the next two years, it will do so with GSA Vice President, Policy and Professional Affairs Patricia “Trish” D’Antonio serving as chair.

Congratulations to Trish for being named to this important post! Our society was a founding member of FoNIA, which now boasts more than 50 organizational members. It’s a broad coalition of organizations committed to the advancement of health sciences research that affects older Americans.

Congratulations to the editorial leadership of GSA’s journals for taking a very proactive step in advancing GSA’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They have published a new editorial, jointly appearing in the current issue of all of GSA’s journals, that offers guidance to all authors and reviewers moving forward — while also pledging to nurture the growth and recognition of scholars from groups that have been underrepresented in the journals.

The latest issue of Public Policy & Aging Report (PP&AR), “Addressing Systemic Inequities and Policy Deficiencies in the U.S.,” was overseen by the leadership of GSA’s Social Research, Policy, and Practice (SRPP) Section and is linked to the 2021 Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) theme, “Disruption to Transformation: Aging in the ‘New Normal.’” SRPP Past Chair Bob Harootyan, MS, MA, FGSA, and current SRPP Chair Philip A Rozario, PhD, FGSA, served as contact editors and authored the issue’s opening article.

“The unprecedented disruptions precipitated by the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and its disparate impacts, especially among communities of frail older adults and neighborhoods of color, are telling examples of persistent and insidious systemic forms of discrimination in society,” Harootyan and Rozario wrote. “During the same time, media coverage of police brutality and killings in the United States led to heightened demands for equity and justice for Black Americans and other marginalized populations. To that end, the 2021 ASM’s theme and the articles in this issue of PP&AR reflect our aspirations to learn from our past and reinvent a more equitable future.”

We are on the cusp of a major expansion to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. Plans continue to move forward for the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which would be housed at NIH.

This new agency — inspired by the achievements driven the by Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)— is designed to “embrace bold and high-risk, high reward solutions with the potential to accelerate disruptive progress across an array of diseases and conditions and at levels ranging from the molecular to the societal.”

The official dates of the GSA 2021 Annual Scientific Meeting Online are now in the rearview mirror, but I’m guessing even the most dedicated GSA member couldn’t have taken in all 1,200 individual symposium presentations, 700 papers, and 1,400 posters within a four-day span!

Fortunately, all of our scientific program remains accessible for registered attendees in on-demand format on the GSA 2021 meeting platform. All of this rich content — which embodied our meeting theme of “Disruption to Transformation: Aging in the ‘New Normal” — is available for consumption until December 31.