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.
This year's annual Crime in Alaska report was recently released. Brad Myrstol, Justice Center Professor and Alaska Justice Information Center Director, discussed the data compiled from police agencies across the state with Anchorage Daily News.
UAA Justice Center Professor and Alaska Justice Information Center Director, Brad Myrstol, spoke with KNBA about the disproportionally high number of Alaska Native and American Indian inmates in the Alaskan and U.S. prison system.
Kimberly Russell was raised in Anchorage and is a 2008 UAA Justice graduate who currently works at McLaughlin Youth Center as a Social Services Associate II.
Back in the early 1990s, newspaper headlines were fixated on Rodney King and O.J. Simpson-two of the most renowned court cases of David Campbell's generation. In his early 20s at the time, David remembers how current events and an Introduction to Justice course finally piqued his interest enough to settle on a major.
J.R. Dull has his dream job-working with kids in the Bristol Bay Region and helping them stay out of trouble, and if they don't, helping them get the services they need to get back on track. J.R. is the supervising juvenile probation officer in Dillingham, Alaska, and is responsible for all the juvenile cases in the 32 villages in the Bristol Bay Region, an area of about 40,000 square miles. Born in Dillingham and raised in the village of New Stuyahok on the Nushagak River, J.R. moved back to Dillingham for high school, then on to Anchorage to pursue a major in justice at UAA.
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.