Lourdes R. Guerrero

The Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) is a flagship education, training, and development program of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) focused on increasing the number and diversity of researchers in aging. Authors sought to assess the program's contributions to geriatric and gerontology education by examining the scientific productivity of 294 RCMAR scientists who received pilot funding from the program during the last complete grant cycle, 2018 to 2023.

Across the 18 funded sites, the scientists obtained 53 NIH grants and 29 NIA-specific grants. They published 281 manuscripts, of which 141 were noted as direct outcomes of the pilot funding and support received through the program.

Findings: The findings indicated that the RCMAR program in its last cycle succeeded in promoting education and scientific career development of researchers from diverse backgrounds and researchers focused on health disparities to conduct transdisciplinary social and behavioral aging research.
 

Summary: Home care workers (HCWs) provide essential care in patients’ homes but are often underappreciated and work in stressful and isolated environments with diverse and intersecting support needs. This study describes a computer-mediated peer support program that centers around sharing circles: spaces for personal, narrative storytelling to encourage HCWs to collaboratively reflect on their home care experiences and build rapport with their peers. Authors describe program design and a 12-week deployment to evaluate the program with 42 HCWs in New York City. 

Findings: Participants engaged in multiple types of peer support including emotional validation, learning how to navigate the workplace and patient care, defining and enabling good home care praxis, and building understanding around purpose and identity as HCWs. Authors discuss how findings inform the design of technology and use of holistic pedagogies, such as storytelling, to enable this support in computer-mediated peer support programs. Such programs can help researchers and practitioners interested in addressing diverse needs that occur in intersectional contexts, such as that of HCWs and other marginalized populations.

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• Journal Article: Computer-Mediated Sharing Circles for Intersectional Peer Support with Home Care Workers

​Summary: Older adults are most at risk of negative COVID-19 outcomes and consequences. This study applies the World Health Organization's Health Inequity Causal Model to identify different factors that may be driving the higher observed hospitalizations and deaths among older adults of color compared to non-Latinx whites in the United States. Authors used multiple datasets, including the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey and Household Pulse Survey COVID data, along with published reports, to understand the social context of older adults, including income distributions by race and ethnicity, household composition and potential COVID-19 exposure to older adults by working family members.

Findings: The researchers’ findings point to multiple social determinants of health, beyond individual health risks, which may explain why older adults of color are the most at risk of negative COVID-19 outcomes and consequences. Current health policies do not adequately address disproportionate impact; some even worsen it. This manuscript provides new data and analysis to support the call for equity-focused solutions to this pandemic and health in general in the future, focusing on meeting the needs of our most vulnerable communities.

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• Journal Article: The Impact of COVID-19 on Diverse Older Adults and Health Equity in the United States

​Summary: To identify which mentoring domains influence publication productivity among early career researchers and trainees and whether publication productivity differs between underrepresented minority (URM) and well-represented groups (WRGs). The mentoring aspects that promote publication productivity remain unclear. Advancing health equity requires a diverse workforce, yet URM trainees are less likely to publish and URM investigators are less likely to obtain federal research grants, relative to WRG counterparts.

A mentoring-focused online follow-up survey was administered to respondents of the NRMN Annual Survey who self-identified as mentees. Publications were identified from a public database and validated with participant CV data. Bivariate and multivariate analyses tested the associations of publication productivity with mentoring domains.

Findings: URM investigators and trainees had fewer publications than their WRG counterparts. Controlling for career stage and social characteristics, those who worked on funded projects, and received grant-writing or research mentorship, had a higher probability of any publications. Controlling for URM status, gender, and career stage, mentorship on grant-writing and funding was positively associated with publication count. Holding career stage, gender, and mentoring experiences constant, WRG investigators and trainees had more publications than their URM counterparts.

Grant-writing mentorship is particularly important for publication productivity. Future research should investigate whether grant-writing mentorship differentially impacts URM and WRG investigators and should investigate how and why grant-writing mentorship fosters increased publication productivity.

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• Journal Article: Mentoring Experiences and Publication Productivity Among Early Career Biomedical Investigators and Trainees