Albert L. Siu, M.D., M.S.P.H. 

Albert Siu is Professor of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director of the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center.

He is the Chair Emeritus (Chair from 2003 to 2017) of the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine—one of the largest geriatrics programs in the nation. As Chair, Dr. Siu grew the clinical, educational, and research programs of the department, which houses a number of signature programs, including the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, Center to Advance Palliative Care, National Palliative Care Research Center, Martha Stewart Center for Living, Bronx VA GRECC, and several collaborative programs in geriatrics education such as the Portal of Geriatric Online Education, Donald W. Reynolds Consortium for Faculty Development to Advance Geriatric Education, and New York Consortium of Geriatrics Education Center. The department’s clinical programs account for more than 25,000 outpatient visits, 6,000 inpatient visits, and 1,500 home visits to primary care patients annually. He is Principal Investigator of the National Institute on Aging Claude Pepper Center at Mount Sinai. 

Dr. Siu earned his M.D. from Yale Medical School and his M.S.P.H. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health. He completed a residency in internal medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar fellowship at UCLA. He joined the UCLA medical faculty in 1985, with a joint appointment at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Siu served as Chief of the Division of Geriatric Medicine at UCLA from 1989 until his departure in 1993 to become a Deputy Commissioner in the New York State Department of Health. In 1995, he joined Mount Sinai as a Professor in the Department of Health Policy. From 1998 to 2002, he was the Clifford Spingarn Professor of Medicine and Chief of General Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai, before becoming Chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine.

Dr. Siu served for 12 years on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force as a member, Vice Chair, and Chair. He is a Senior Associate Editor at Health Services Research. He has served on foundation and nonprofit boards. Dr. Siu’s research aims to improve the quality and delivery of care provided to geriatric populations. His studies have focused on the measurement and improvement of functional outcomes in the elderly, as well as evaluations of system interventions to improve the care for chronic illness.

Heather Allore, Ph.D.

The focus of Dr. Allore’s research collaborations and methodological development work, as Director of Biostatistics at the Yale Program on Aging for 12 years and Director of the Yale Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s Data Management and Statistics Core, is Gerontological Biostatistics, which is the field she founded. She is Co-Director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core of the Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Precision Medicine focused on Health Disparities; the center’s focus is adults with multiple chronic conditions. Innovative designs and biostatistical methods are required to rigorously address the myriad of unanswered scientific questions.

With over 180 peer-reviewed articles and continuous NIH funding since 2000, Dr. Allore’s research has focused on issues related to the design of clinical trials for older adults, particularly those evaluating multicomponent interventions.

Dr. Allore was an invited speaker at a National Institute on Aging’s conference on longitudinal methods and another on clinical trial design. In 2017, she co-chaired the Study Design and Metrics component of the NIH meeting on the 21st Century Cures Act: Inclusion Across the Lifespan. She has a wealth of experience conducting epidemiologic studies and is a recognized authority on longitudinal statistical methods, including extended Cox models for state transitions, generalized estimating equations, mixed effects models, latent class trajectory models, and joint models.

A defining hallmark of Dr. Allore’s biostatistical approach is that instead of developing analytic methods in the absence of a clinical question or adapting the study question to available analytical techniques, she adapts new statistical methods that suitably model the specific study question.

Darryl Brown, Ph.D,

Darryl Brown is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Director, Doctoral Programs, in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. He teaches courses in health economics, health care management, health care policy, health inequality, health outcomes research, and principles of assessment. Dr. Brown has taught research methods as an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University and Arcadia University. He has also served as a Visiting Professor and Erasmus Mundus Scholar to the Rennes School of Public Health, France.

Dr. Brown serves on CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Board of Scientific Counselors. He has been named to grant review panels for the CDC, AHRQ, and NIH. He is an editorial peer reviewer for Health Equity and the Journal of Racial and Health Disparities.

Dr. Brown’s health care research experience includes serving as Health Economist, Co-Investigator on community-based research projects with colleagues in the Drexel School of Public Health and the Drexel College of Medicine. At the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he directed cost-effectiveness studies in diabetes disease management and patient-provider communication. His professional experience also includes comparative effectiveness research in pharmaceutical outcomes for Genentech, Inc. and Galderma Laboratories. He has also held administrative research positions at the New Jersey Department of Health, Center for Health Statistics, and the Temple University Health System.

Dr. Brown received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a master’s in health policy and management from the Wagner School, New York University.

Susan T. Charles, Ph.D.

Susan Charles is Professor of Psychological Sciences and Nursing Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She also serves as Associate Dean of the UCI Graduate Division.

Dr. Charles’s research is informed by the theoretical model of Strength and Vulnerability Integration (SAVI), which describes how emotional well-being changes across the life span. SAVI describes how age is related to greater abilities, or strengths, in emotion regulation that enable older adults to avoid highly negative situations and maintain their well-being. When older adults cannot avoid highly distressing situations, however, age-related declines in physical functioning often lead to poorer emotion-related outcomes. As a result, understanding a person’s environmental context and a person’s health status allows researchers to predict when older adults will be able to use emotion regulation strategies to avoid negative situations and maintain high levels of well-being, and when they fail to do so and experience distress.

Her NIH-supported research program focuses on life-span trajectories of socioemotional experiences and age differences in emotion regulation strategies. In addition, she studies how physical health conditions (both illness and disability) are associated with emotional well-being, and how these associations may vary with age.

Dr. Charles is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and she serves on the editorial boards for Psychology of Aging and for Emotion.

Matthew Lohman, Ph.D.

Matthew Lohman is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of South Carolina, Arnold School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, where he has been a faculty member since 2017. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Arnold School’s Office for the Study of Aging.

Dr. Lohman’s primary research areas are in psychiatric epidemiology, gerontology, geriatric mental health services, and the epidemiology of adverse health outcomes such as falls, hospitalizations, and acquired disabilities. His research work utilizes diverse study designs and analytic methods to understand factors influencing health and well-being among older adults, including large population-based cohort studies, vital records data linkage, latent variable modelling, and randomized controlled trials. He is particularly interested in the role of mental health and mental health disorders such as major depressive disorder in determining risk of adverse physical health outcomes and health service utilization in later life.

In addition, Dr. Lohman is interested in the role of long-term care services and settings, such as nursing home facilities and home health care nursing agencies, as important points of engagement in strategies to prevent age-related poor health outcomes. Dr. Lohman collaborates actively with researchers from several other disciplines, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and biostatisticians in developing and informing differing prevention approaches.