Everyone living in the Circumpolar North should have the opportunity to live a long
and healthy life. However, we live in an environment that can be challenging as we
get older. The physical environment may be difficult to navigate (extreme weather,
changing climate, high costs of living, etc) but it is important to remember that
the social environment also changes for us as we age. As more adults are choosing
to age-in-place and retire at home here in Alaska, we are noticing real gaps in our
knowledge about what healthy aging means to our elders and how we can achieve it in
our Arctic environment.
The Healthy Aging Lab at UAA works to understand the shifting sociocultural landscape
for aging adults and identify service needs to facilitate healthy aging-in-place.
We do this in a variety of ways, from Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
projects, to community-engaged courses in health sciences, to individual service-learning
projects—our work aims to benefit not only the student (and future geriatric workforce),
but the senior community as well.
Nicole Blue has been part of the Seawolf Women’s Volleyball team since 2020. She’s a champion both on and off the court! The senior is pursuing her Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences with a focus in Speech Language Pathology. Blue shares some highlights from her time at UAA.
Nicole Blue is pursuing her Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences with a focus in Speech Language Pathology. She's also a senior player on the UAA women's volleyball team! Blue shared her experiences in the programs.
Hannah’s two degrees from UAA’s Division of Population Health Sciences have been invaluable to her as a program coordinator at Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
UAA has been ranked one of the nation’s best schools for online health care degrees and certificates for 2023. Six percent of regionally accredited colleges and universities earned a ranking position.
University of Alaska Anchorage and Division of Population Health Sciences (DPHS) alumna Jordan Kamer (BS, Health Sciences, ‘17) has a pretty important job. As a public health educator with the Municipality of Anchorage Health Department, she is responsible for providing community education and guidance on public health—everything from COVID-19, to naloxone, to age-appropriate sex education.
The UAA Healthy Aging Research Laboratory is partially supported by an Institutional
Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number 2P20GM103395. The content
is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official
views of Alaska INBRE.