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June 23, 2011

Clougherty, Tang win Manners awards

The University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) has announced the winners of the 11th annual Steven D. Manners Faculty Development Awards. The awards were established in memory of the center’s assistant director, who died in 2000.

UCSUR offers annual awards in two categories: research development grants to support pilot research in the social, behavioral and policy sciences, and infrastructure development awards aimed at enhancing faculty capabilities to carry out interdisciplinary research in the social, behavioral and policy sciences.

This year’s winners are:

• Jane E. Clougherty, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Graduate School of Public Health, for the project, “Adapting Geospatial Modeling Methods to Assess Individual-Level Variability in Urban Chronic Stress.”

Clougherty and her co-investigators propose a novel adaptation of spatial modeling methods developed for air pollution epidemiology known as “land-use regression,” or LUR, to predict individual-level stress as a function of community-level stressor exposures. The “stress LUR” models will enable exploration of the proportion of individual-level chronic stress that may be attributable to community stressors; identification of key community stressors most associated with individual stress experience, and — if the models predict individual stress — the extrapolation of chronic stress exposure estimates across large urban cohorts for epidemiological analyses.

• Fengyan Tang, assistant professor in the School of Social Work, for the project, “Retirement Transition, Volunteer Engagement and Physical Health.”

Current cohorts of older adults are engaging productively in increasing amounts of paid work and volunteer activity. This study will use the Health and Retirement Study (1998-2008) panel data to investigate the dynamic process of retirement transitions, associated changes in volunteer engagement during such transitions and related physical health changes among middle-aged and older adults.

This study also will examine group differences based on gender, race and social class and contextual effects of birth cohorts and time periods on the relationship between productive engagement and physical health change.

—Peter Hart


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