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.
Social work master’s student Jay Greene (pronouns: they/them, he/him) believes in system reform through policy, as evidenced in their work with UAA’s LGBTQIA2S+ Committee and Gender Inclusive Housing Committee. Greene was a recipient of the Student Diversity Scholarship.
In December and January, UAA’s Alaska Airlines Center (AAC) became a focal point for two critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts. In the same time frame, several UAA faculty, staff and students contributed to a report on the effects of Anchorage’s COVID-19 emergency orders. The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) announced on Dec. 9 that the AAC had been established as the state-run infusion center for two new monoclonal antibody therapies that can reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections.
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.