EdDem Network Affiliate Dr. Dahai Yue has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to examine how education and infectious disease impact disparities in mortality.
With support from this grant, Yue, who is a health policy and management professor and director of the School of Public Health’s Center on Aging at the University of Maryland, and his research team will examine how childhood experiences and environments play a role in disparities in mortality. The team will gather, link, and analyze health and mortality data from publicly available censuses from 1890 to 1940, the National Death Index, and family tree information from the Family Search database. In particular, the team will examine how two key factors in childhood—quality of education and the infectious disease environment—may predict differences in longevity and cause of death, perhaps with variation across race and geography.
“This is the first study to follow a huge sample of people from birth all the way to death, looking at the causal relationship between childhood origins of health and health disparities,” Yue said in MarylandToday. “To our knowledge, this will be the largest individual-level data gathering on mortality in the U.S.”
Yue said that the EdDem Network’s mentorship and support aided in the process of securing the research grant.
“EdDem’s generous support, enabling me to attend trainings and workshops across the country, has been invaluable in shaping my research idea, particularly regarding the quality of education,” he said.
Congratulations, Dr. Yue!