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Statement Of Jay S. Magaziner
Environmental Protection Agency
Aging Initiative Public Listening Session
Baltimore, Maryland
May 7, 2003
Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine
Director, Division of Gerontology
Director, Center for Research on Aging, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Welcome. I am the head of the Center for the Center for Research on Aging at the University of Maryland, and on behalf of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Center for Research on Aging, I'd like to welcome Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and other guests and all who will participate today. As you are probably well aware, the health professional school campus of U-MD, where we have six professional schools offering degrees in dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and social work as well as graduate degrees in multiple basic and applied disciplines is where we are today. It is within this multi-disciplinary and inter-professional context that I would like to tell you a little about our commitment to research in aging and environmental sciences and how a university like ours can respond to issues relating to the environment and aging.
Our Center for Research on Aging is a campus-wide program whose mission is to coordinate and help to focus research and research training in aging in ways that will allows us to transcend traditional disciplinary values, and I want to come back to that in a moment. We have multiple programs looking at a host of multiple biological, psycho social and cultural processes that change with age and that effect our growing older population. Because we are inter-disciplinary, and we engage in a wide range from the basic molecular sciences to applied research that extends into neighborhoods and communities, we are well equipped to develop and test model programs and take on new challenges requiring multiple strategies. The School of Medicine also has significant faculty and laboratory resources and is engaged in many areas of environmental health sciences. A new program in how pathogenic organisms affect the body, studies on antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance, studies of effects of noise on well being, work on the changing immune system and effects of air pollution, and some very interesting work in toxicology that is examining the way pesticides and other environmental chemicals including those found in cigarette smoke affect the aging reproductive system and menopausal symptoms on women.
I want to highlight two areas where we should be directing attention and where universities can have an important role. First is the opportunity that universities with interdisciplinary programs have to bring together scientists with expertise in many areas. In the case of University of Maryland Baltimore, we are in a position to bring together scientists studying the multiple biological, psycho-social, cultural and environmental aspects of aging to bring these together basic and clinical scientists who are studying environmental health concerns. Universities with a major emphasis on aging are already examining the multiple changes that are occurring with aging, and interdisciplinary centers like ours can easily bring scientists with this expertise together with those knowledgeable about toxic exposures and those issues surround the maintenance of safe ecosystems.
The university is an institution that should be actively engaged in the surrounding communities and should be designing and implementing model programs to maximize the health of the public in these and other areas. To this end, the University as a whole and the Center for Research on Aging are committed to developing ties with local communities so we are all prepared to work together on initiatives like this one. We are very excited about the opportunities of collaborating in this session today, and look forward to a productive future together.