A team led by Iliana Kohler, assistant research professor, associate director of the Population Studies Center, and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, has won a National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge Catalyst Award supporting aging and health-related research in Malawi, Africa. Titled “Leveraging Social Networks and Linkage to Care to Foster Healthy Aging in a Low-Income Context,” Dr. Kohler’s project is in keeping with the international scope of the NAM program, which gave Catalyst Awards to research teams in the U.S., the UK, the European Union, Israel, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and Tanzania.

Since 2010, Dr. Kohler has been studying aging and health in Malawi, Africa. The Malawi project is one of 124 receiving Catalyst Awards in the first round of NAM’s new program. The proposed aging research work is an offshoot of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health, which has been run by Penn’s Population Studies Center and Population Aging Research Center for two decades.

“Our study population in Malawi broadly represents the living conditions of large numbers of individuals living in poor sub-Saharan countries, so the relevance of our work extends beyond Malawi,” explains Dr. Kohler.

The Penn team’s Catalyst work is aimed at understanding how social networks—physical rather than electronic networks—could be used to disseminate elder health information about non-communicable diseases throughout a country lacking the mass communications infrastructure of industrialized nations.

Founded by NAM and launched in December of 2019 in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging, the Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge Catalyst program is a global innovation tournament designed to accelerate scientific advances related to health care and the elderly.