Rebeca Wong, University of Texas Medical Branch

About the Presentation for the Fall 2020 MPRC Online Seminar Series

Until recently, most of what we knew about population aging came from developed countries, based on data from large national longitudinal cohorts. More recent access to comparable data from developing countries allows research using cross-national comparisons. The talk will ask the question: what can we learn from these comparisons? We will illustrate with cognitive aging using MHAS data.

About the Speaker

Dr. Wong is a Mexican scholar who received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1987. Dr. Wong's research agenda focuses on health disparities and aging, and on the economic consequences of population aging, in particular in Mexico and among immigrant Hispanics in the U.S. She has pioneered the use of cross-national approaches to study health outcomes among international migrants. She serves as Principal Investigator of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), financed by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and the Statistical Bureau of Mexico. The study seeks to locate research on Mexico's unique health dynamics in broad socioeconomic context, and it includes a national longitudinal survey of multiple purposes among population of middle and old age. A description of the study and list of publications related to the MHAS is available at www.MHASweb.org. Dr. Wong has served in the editorial boards of the journals Demography, J. of Aging and Health, J. of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and Papeles de Poblacion. She has served the profession in various national and global committees including the International Outreach Committee of the Population Association of America, the National Academy of Sciences, and as member of review study sections for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She has also served as member of the Board of Directors of both the Population Association of America and the Mexican Society of Demography. She currently serves as member of the Advisory Council for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the NIH. 

Note:  Zoom Link for Registration.  Upon registration you will receive an automatically generated email with the link for the seminar.