We are very excited to share some huge wins and milestones achieved by our GREMAP faculty, staff, and students in the last few months. Although we make an effort to celebrate our wins, both big and small, on a regular basis, it is always great to see the hard work and dedication of our team recognized and celebrated outside of our research group.

Research lab manager Lily Johns was awarded the 2026 OVPR Research Associate Recognition Award for her work on the ATLAS Study. She was recognized along with 11 other staff members from nine schools, colleges and units across UM for their significant contributions to the university’s research activities and operations. Congratulations to Lily on this great accomplishment! You can read more about this year’s OVPR awardees here.

Above: Lily, her family, and GREMAP folks at the OVPR awards ceremony in May.

Dr. Mezuk was the recipient of the 2026 James Jackson Outstanding Mentorship Award. In honor of the late Dr. James Jackson, this award is given annually by the Gerontological Society of American (GSA) to recognize outstanding commitment and dedication to mentoring minority researchers in the field of aging. The award will be presented at the plenary session of this year’s Annual Scientific Meeting in November, which will be held in National Harbor, MD. A huge congratulations to Dr. Mezuk for this recognition!

Undergraduate student and long-time GREMAP research assistant Emma Spring was accepted to the SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University Medical School! She will be attending the program in her home town of Brooklyn, NY and plans to focus on embryonic medicine. Congratulations, Emma and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors!

GREMAP staff member Dr. Linh Dang was recently awarded her first grant as PI! Dr. Dang’s project “Community-Based Services for Older Adults with ADRD: Availability, Utilization, and State Context” was recently selected for a pilot award by the Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer’s (CAPRA) at UM. This study will analyze linked data from the Health and Retirement Study and the National Neighborhood Data Archive to examine how neighborhood and state contexts influence the availability and utilization of home- and community-based services by older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). This work was funded by CAPRA to advance their center-wide mission to enable high quality, multidisciplinary research on the economic, health services, and population health dimensions of ADRD. Congratulations to Linh!

Last month, GREMAP staff member Alejandro Rodríguez-Putnam was invited to present at the Collective Action for Violence Prevention Symposium held by the Puerto Rico (PR) Institute of Statistics. His talk was titled “Prevention of violent deaths by firearms” and discussed key findings and frameworks from the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention pilot study that he manages along with Dr. Mezuk and Dr. Elyse Thulin. This study leverages quantitative and qualitative data from the PR Violent Death Reporting System (PR-VDRS) to identify and characterize collective violence in homicide cases of Puerto Rican men aged 15-44.

An integral part of this study is our close collaboration with investigators from the PR Institute of Statistics, notably Dr. Diego Zavala and Mariluz Bezares Salinas, who lead the PR-VDRS data collection and analysis efforts. This symposium was a great opportunity to present our findings in conversation the work of Dr. Zavala and other researchers from the Institute of Statistics as well as to engage with stakeholders working in violence prevention in PR.

You can read more about the symposium in the press release here. Also, as a part of the event’s media coverage, both Alejandro and Dr. Zavala were interviewed by the local news to comment on the importance of violence prevention for youth mental health. You can watch the full news segment here.

Amazing work, Alejandro and congratulations on this accomplishment!

We are excited to share that data from the quantitative component of the Diabetes, Distress, and Disparities (i.e., ‘3D’) Study has been published in ICPSR!

As part of the Diabetes and Mental Health (DMH) Initiative, which was funded by the UM Caswell Diabetes Institute, GREMAP team members conducted the Diabetes, Distress, and Disparities (i.e., ‘3D’) Study, which consisted of two sequential and integrated, phases: (1) an online survey, fielded in Qualtrics, that addressed a broad range of psychological, social, behavioral, and environmental factors relevant to the assessing the psychosocial care needs of persons with diabetes and (2) semi-structured interviews among a sub-sample of Qualtrics respondents that delved further into certain topics (e.g., social/family support, financial strain, stigma).

The quantitative data from the Qualtrics survey was recently made publicly-available in the ICPSR data repository, where it is free for researchers to download and analyze. You can find the dataset and documentation here: https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39557.v1

In addition to conferences, presentations, and other research-related accomplishments, we have also had the opportunity to connect with each other and celebrate the personal wins and accomplishments of our staff and students.

First, we are excited to share that Chris Okine, who is a medical student at Michigan Medicine collaborating with GREMAP, matched into Family Medicine at Lawndale Christian Health Center in Chicago (his top choice!!). Congratulations to Chris for this amazing accomplishment!

Chris at Match Day with his family celebrating his match into Lawndale in Chicago.

In March, we were fortunate to have Alejandro, who is based in San Juan, visit Ann Arbor for the few weeks that coincided with the IFIP and IPC conferences. During his visit, we were able to take some time away from work to connect, de-stress, and have some fun:)

Notably, we held a lab social event at Decode Ann Arbor, where we successfully completed a puzzle game room “Around the World in 80 Days”!

Alejandro also caught up with everyone in Ann Arbor over dinner or coffee.

It’s been a busy winter semester here at GREMAP! The last few months have been packed with conferences, grant submissions, exams, and other deadlines, on top of our ongoing work on different research projects and papers. However, we also have many wins, accomplishments, and milestones achieved by our students and staff to celebrate!

Conferences, posters, and presentations

In March, our team had the opportunity to present at multiple UM conferences and symposiums, including the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention (IFIP) Annual Research Day, the Injury Prevention Center (IPC) Research Symposium, and the UMAging Initiative Symposium (UMAging), which is an annual conference that highlights research from aging research centers across the University.

IFIP & IPC. Research Staff Alejandro Rodriguez-Putnam and PhD student Omar Pedraza co-presented their work characterizing collective and community violence in NVDRS at both the IFIP Research Day and the IPC Symposium.

Left: Omar presenting their poster at IFIP; Right: Alejandro posing next to their poster at IPC.

Dr. Eskira Kahsay, who is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in ISR, presented her dissertation work at the IPC Symposium poster session, for which she was awarded the IPC Excellence in Research Award!

Left: Eskira receiving the research award for her poster; Right: Eskira pictured with her award and poster at IPC.

UMAging. Many of our team members attended the UMAging Symposium, which was a great opportunity to connect with our colleagues and collaborators from different research centers and departments and hear about the work they are doing. As a MCUAAAR faculty member, Dr. Mezuk gave a research talk on “Sense-making in the Acute Aftermath of Older Adult Suicide Deaths: An Application of Large Language Models”, which highlights key findings from our analysis exploring meaning-making in NVDRS data, which is led by Dr. Kalesnikava.

NSAL 25-year follow up

We have also been busy with the NSAL project! The team is gearing up to go into the field later this year and are focusing on finalizing the questionnaire, building relationships with community partners, and working on recruitment and outreach.

Earlier this semester, we had the opportunity to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with an event focused on the NSAL follow-up survey, entitled “Extending the Legacy: Innovations of the 25-Year Follow-up of the National Survey of American Life”. This MLK-day event featured presentations by NSAL project leadership including Dr. Mezuk, Project Director Dr. Deborah Robinson, Expert Advisory Board member Dr. Belinda Tucker, and Stephanie Chardoul, who is the Director of Survey Research Operations at ISR. We were also very fortunate to be joined by interviewers who conducted fieldwork in the original NSAL survey (fielded in 2001), who led a panel discussion drawing from their experiences and expertise.

Above [left]: NSAL interviewers and Stephanie Chardoul during the panel discussion; Above [right]: Dr. Robinson presenting at the event; Below: Project leadership posing in the James S. Jackson atrium at ISR at the reception.

This event was also featured in an article for The Michigan Daily, which you can read here.

We have had a busy last few weeks here at GREMAP! In November, folks from the research group had the opportunity to attend various meetings and conferences to present their work and connect with collaborators, both old and new.

In early November, Dr. Mezuk and her co-PI Toni Antounucci held a day-long working meeting focused on their recent grant from the NIA, which will reinterview the cohort from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) to assess key cognitive and psychosocial outcomes. The event was hosted at Harvard University and was an amazing opportunity for study leadership, staff, and collaborators to get together, connect, and work collaboratively to prepare for going into the field.

The NSAL ‘2.0’ team pictured in the medical library at Harvard.

In addition, many GREMAP members and collaborators attended the the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting, which took place from November 12th-15th (also in Boston!). At the meeting, folks presented their work on a variety of topics related to aging and health, including contextual/neighborhood factors, mental health and suicidality, and expectations related to work and aging.

GREMAP presentations included:

• “Association between Residential Segregation and Suicide across the Lifecourse among Black Americans”, presented by Dr. Eskira Kahsay
• “Spousal Work Expectations and Psychological Distress: Insights from the United States and South Korea”, presented by Dr. Linh Dang
• “Feeling Younger Every Day? Daily Activities and Subjective Age in the Health and Retirement Study”, presented by Dr. Briana Mezuk, alongside co-presenter Dr. Wassim Tarraf
• “The Structure of Major Life Transitions among Older Suicide Decedents: An Application of Large Language Models”, presented by Dr. Briana Mezuk

GREMAP members [left to right] Briana Mezuk, Kallisse Dent, Linh Dang, Eskira Kahsay, and Cullen Zhong at the GSA conference.

Lastly, doctoral student Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, who is pursuing a dual degree in Social Work and Information, presented her work on the intersection between state policies, housing transitions, and suicidality at the 2025 Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) meeting. The talk was titled “State Housing Policy Environments and Suicide Risk among Households Experiencing Eviction and Foreclosure” and highlights her work using data from multiple sources to examine the effect of state-level policies (e.g., resident protections, eviction moratoria) on suicide deaths related to eviction and foreclosure. You can read the full abstract here.

We are excited to share that GREMAP PhD student Cullen Zhong participated in last week’s Nerd Nite Ann Arbor! Nerd Nite is monthly speaker series organized by the Ann Arbor district library that brings together the community to engage in science and research in a fun and informal setting. The events usually feature 3 speakers, who each give a brief talk (between 15-20 minutes) on a topic on which they are either expert or (at least) over-informed. Cullen spoke about her research on social connection and loneliness among older adults with a talk entitled “Loneliness Hurts—and let’s talk about it”.

This talk was developed as a part of the RELATE summer workshop, which Cullen participated in this summer. RELATE, which stands for “Researcher Expanding Lay-Audience Teaching and Engagement”, is an 8-week long workshop organized by UM graduate students that is designed to prepare early-career researchers to effectively communicate their research to a broader audience. As a final deliverable, Cullen gave a talk at Nerd Nite as a way to engage her research with a general audience and practice the science communication skills developed over the course of the workshop. Great work, Cullen!

Cullen presenting an introduction to social connection and its importance in our daily lives at Nerd Nite!

The Diabetes and Mental Health (DMH) Initiative was featured in a news release published last month by the team at the Caswell Diabetes Institute (CDI). The news article highlighted the work of the CDI Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC), which engages a diverse group of community members who have lived experience with diabetes in the work of the CDI. This past year, the PFAC has contributed their expertise to a variety of research projects and initiatives that focus on the psychosocial aspects of diabetes care and management, including stigma, emotional distress, diabetes education, and caregiving.

As the article highlights, we have collaborated with the PFAC to inform our work on the DMH Study, which aims to generate novel data and actionable insights to address stigma, diabetes-related distress, and the emotional or psychological burden of diabetes management. Over the course of the project, we brought our works-in-progress and questions to the PFAC, who shared their personal experiences of diabetes-related stigma and made concrete recommendations that guided our research focus. Overall, the input of the PFAC and their lived experience of the emotional aspects of living or caring for someone with diabetes has been invaluable to our development of this project. You can read the full news article here.