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.
After serving a year as the President-elect of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), Yvonne Chase is now the president. Dr. Chase shares some of her vibrant background in human services that led her to UAA.
Vanessa Hiratsuka from CHD and Britteny Howell from DPHS are the new Co-Directors for UAA’s National Resource Center on Alaska Native Elders. Vanessa Hiratsuka shares her hopes for the center’s future.
Vanessa Hiratsuka from CHD and Britteny Howell from DPHS are the new Co-Directors for UAA’s National Resource Center on Alaska Native Elders. Britteny Howell shares her journey into geriatrics.
Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) term assistant professor Megan Bennett discusses her excitement about teaching courses for the AAS in Speech-Language Pathology Assistant, a new degree option within the SLP program, and being a new faculty member at UAA.
Department of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation assistant professor, Eric Oba, has no "prob-llama" sharing his passion for teaching therapeutic recreation courses and how he earned the title of Mr. June in the 2023 Mountain Men of Alaska calendar.
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.