Given the aging of the population in our country, and indeed in many countries throughout the world, an understanding of how aging influences bodies, brains, minds and communities is rapidly becoming a critical societal issue. At the same time, there is growing recognition that the effects of aging on the body, the brain, and the mind are subject to multiple determinants so that healthy communities can play an important role in creating healthy aging. The Beckman Institute has been at the forefront of addressing these issues of age-related change (both positive and negative) for many years, most recently exemplified by its NIH funded Royal Center for Healthy Minds.
Researchers at the Beckman Institute have collaborated to examine how perceptual, cognitive and motor skills and processes change throughout the adult life span. This research has led to the development of interventions and technologies that can enhance successful aging. Examples include the following:
- The NIH-funded Senior Odyssey project has discovered that multimodal interventions, which encourage sustained social and intellectual engagement, can enhance cognitive function of older adults
- Researchers have, with long-term NIH funding, studied how physical activity and exercise influence quality of life, cognition, brain structure and function of older adults
- Teams of engineers, life scientists, and researchers in speech and hearing have designed and tested an intelligent hearing aid to enhance the auditory processing of the elderly and other populations
- Experimental work, in collaboration with Carle Clinic in Urbana, Illinois, is being conducted to understand brain plasticity following cochlear implant
- A group of Beckman researchers from Education, Linguistics, and Speech and Hearing are examining whether learning a new language, with the assistance of a prosody tutor developed with NSF support, can enhance cognitive function of older adults
The near-term future plan for Promoting Successful Aging includes:
- Developing new centers for both basic and translational research to promote successful and healthy aging
- Writing multidisciplinary project grants that capitalize on human, animal, and computational modeling at the Beckman Institute
- Collaborating with colleagues in imaging to develop novel imaging techniques that enhance the understanding of molecular, cellular, and system-level changes over the adult life span
- Developing cross-laboratory and cross-project databases that enable the development of rich data sets that characterize psychosocial, emotional, cognitive, and biological function of healthy and unhealthy middle-aged and older adults
- Developing computational methodologies for representing and analyzing the vast quantities of data on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer Disease, amassed by the research community
- Building on existing campus outreach efforts to local and national communities to educate about and disseminate Beckman’s growing knowledge base; listen to communities express their needs; and improve the sensitivity and effectiveness of campus outreach efforts