We are excited to share that this year’s Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Reserach (MCUAAAR) Spring Conference will feature multiple presentations from GREMAP’s facutly and students. Starting off, GREMAP PhD student Eskira Kahsay will open the event with her talk “The Nexus of Racial Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Deprivation: Exploring Suicide Risk Among Black Americans”, which explores her dissertation work on the mental health impacts of residential segregation. Later, Dr. Briana Mezuk will be leading the conference’s faculty presentation with her talk on the newly-funded re-interview of the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) titled “Planning for the National Survey of American Life 2.0”. The spring conference will also feature presentations by MCUAAAR research scientists Drs. Nekehia T. Quashie, Myles Durkee, and Carrie Leach on a variety of topics related to the health and wellbeing of Black Americans and older adults.

The event will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, April 9th from 9:00 am – 12:30 pm ET. You can register for the conference with the link here.

We are excited to announce that folks from the ATLAS project team have been awarded third place in a Driven Data competition aimed at improving the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), the nation’s most comprehensive registry of suicide mortality and a core dataset in the ATLAS study.

The competition, hosted by Driven Data on behalf of the CDC, was titled Youth Mental Health Narratives and featured two tracks: Automated Abstraction and Novel Variables. The ATLAS team participated in the Novel Variables track, which focused on analyzing the textual data in the NVDRS narratives to identify new variables to advance research on youth suicidality.

Our final project employed a combination of qualitative (i.e., thematic analysis) and computational (i.e., natural language processing) methods to investigate youth suicidality as it relates to social media and engagement in online spaces. Specifically, we identified 5 novel variables that further describe and contextualize decedents’ social media engagement leading up to the fatal event: “Private Sharing”, “Conflict”, “Victimization”, “Withdrawal”, and “Harmful Exposure”. With these novel variables, we aim to describe non-normative online behavior, drawing on the theoretical work of Durkheim as well as the Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) theory of suicide. The full project submission is detailed here.

This award was featured in a news release from the UM Institute for Social Research and the Research Center for Group Dynamics. Additionally, you can read more about the competition and other winners here. Congratulations to the team on this achievement!

The UM-ATLAS team (left to right): [top row] Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Elyse Thulin, Silas Falde, Lily Johns, Viktoryia Kalesniakva, [bottom row] Jonathan Kertawidjaja, Alejandro Rodriguez-Putnam, and Emma Spring.

Dr. Mezuk was interviewed for a recent article published in Popular Science on life expectancy and humanity’s pursuit of a long (and healthy?) life. The articles discusses key issues aging and life expectancy within the current social and cultural context, including the ways in which systemic inequalities (e.g., where you live) shape people’s outcomes as they age. You can read the full article here.

GREMAP is currently seeking student summer interns to support two innovative projects focused on public mental health and aging. First, we are recruiting a summer intern to work on the Diabetes and Mental Health (DMH) Initiative, which is an interdisciplinary research project aimed at improving the mental health and wellbeing of people with diabetes. The student selected for this position will have the opportunity to collaborate with investigators on the Diabetes, Distress, and Disparities (3D) Study, including data analysis, manuscript writing, and research dissemination. Please find the full job description and qualifications here.

We are also recruiting students to join the newly-launched National Survey of American Life (NSAL) ‘2.0’ project. This project aims to reinterview the NSAL sample, which is the only nationally-representative survey of mental health of Black Americans (n~6,000) that has ever been conducted. In this role, students will gain hands-on experience in study recruitment efforts, community engagement, and research coordination. Please find the full job description and qualifications here.

Overall, candidates for these positions will value working independently and efficiently, collaborating with an interdisciplinary team, and contributing to innovative mental health and aging research. Interested applicants should send their resume, cover letter, and any relevant work samples or portfolio pieces to Ms. Lily Johns (lilyjj@umich.edu).

We are excited to share a recent article that was published in the University of Michigan School of Information News that features our descriptive study on suicide deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, which we conducted as a part of the ATLAS project. This study, which was recently published in PLOS One, examines pandemic-related circumstances contributing to suicide deaths during the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic (i.e., 2020). We used topic modeling to analyze narrative data from the CDC’s National Violent Reporting System and found that, among suicide cases in 2020, 7% of narratives described some aspect of the pandemic, including shutdown restrictions, financial losses, and concerns about infection.

This article gives an overview of they key background and findings of the paper and features interviews from Drs. Briana Mezuk and Kara Zivin, co-PI’s of the ATLAS Study, whose comments highlight the need for research and policy to better understand the impact of the pandemic on suicide and other mental health outcomes so as to inform future prevention and intervention efforts. You can read the full article here.

We are happy to announce that GREMAP’s Linh Dang graduated with a PhD in Epidemiological Science from the University of Michigan this past weekend! Dr. Dang’s dissertation is titled: Work Expectations and Psychological Distress Among American and South Korean Older Adults: Exploring the Contextual Roles of Gender, Family, and the Great Recession. Congrats to Linh!

Dr. Linh Dang (left) with Dr. Briana Mezuk (right) following the UM graduation ceremony.

This past month, GREMAP members attended the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) annual conference. This meeting, which took place in Seattle, is a key meeting for researchers studying aging and older populations. At the meeting, we presented our work on a variety of topics related to aging and health, including residential segregation, functional limitations, social isolation, recent disagnosis, and work expectations.

GREMAP presentations included:

• “Racial Residential Segregation and Suicidal Behavior Across the Lifecourse Among Black Americans”, presented by Eskira Kahsay
• “Work Expectation and Psychological Stress During the Great Recession: The Role of Late-Life Employment Transitions”, presented by Dr. Linh Dang
• “Comparing the association between functional limitations and social isolation among people with and without depressive symptoms”, presented by Chuwen Zhong
• “Interpersonal factors mediating associations of chronic disease with depression and passive suicidal ideation in older adults”, presented by Kallisse Dent

Overall, this year’s GSA conference was a great opportunity to share our work with an interdisciplinary audience. Great work to everyone who presented!

Above [left]: Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong and Viktoryia Kalesnikava. Above [right]: Kallisse Dent and Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong at their poster session. Below (left to right): Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong, Kallisse Dent, Weidi Qin, Eskira Kahsay, and Linh Dang out to dinner in Seattle!

This October, the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health (CSEPH) celebrated its 25th anniversary! The celebration was a day-long event that included a poster session, alumni panel, and keynote presentation by Dr. Ana Diez Roux, a former CSEPH director. GREMAP members celebrated alongside fellow CSEPH-ers and alumni and presented multiple posters on our work at the poster session. Overall, it was a great opportunity to engage with fellow researchers and CSEPH alumni to celebrate the work of CSEPH!

GREMAP at the CSEPH 25th anniversary

During the week of the CSEPH event, we were also excited to welcome GREMAP Research Specialist Alejandro-Rodriguez-Putnam, who traveled from San Juan to visit us in Ann Arbor. Here are some pictures from the various social events that we held, including a trivia night and a baking class with Zingerman’s!

Above: GREMAP members at a baking class at Zingerman’s Bakehouse! Many scones were made and consumed. Below: GREMAP members after a trivia night in downtown Ann Arbor.