Research Projects Bolstered Through Quartet Pilot Competition Funding

Six faculty members from different schools at the University of Pennsylvania are taking their research one step further, with support from the annual Quartet Pilot Research Project Competition. Designed to attract new and early career investigators and encourage cross-disciplinary aging research, the competition provides support for innovative or exploratory research projects leading to National Institutes of Health grant applications.

The “Quartet” is comprised of Penn’s Population Studies Center, Population Aging Research Center, Pension Research Council & Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Security and Leonard Davis Institute Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, which together fund the pilot research projects.

“By pooling resources across centers, it leverages research support across the University and encourages cross-disciplinary and cross-school research collaborations,” said Irma Elo, a professor of sociology and the director of the Population Aging Research Center at Penn.

Selected from a pool of 14 applicants, the six recipients will receive funding for a one-year research project that will begin July 1. The average approved budget per project was $22,000.

The Penn Arts and Sciences recipients include:

Hanming Fang, whose project, “Long-term Care Financing Using Home-equity Release,” evaluates how aging people in China can receive long-term care in their homes and use housing wealth to fund its costs.

Courtney Elizabeth Boen, who joins the Department of Sociology in July, will be working on the project, “Biological Risk, Physical Functioning and Psychosocial Stress Among Older-age Hispanics,” which uses nationally representative, longitudinal data to examine the physical well-being of senior Hispanics relative to other populations and to further assess the stress-related pathways underlying health disparities.

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