Director
Cary Reid, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, Division of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine
Dr. Cary Reid is the Irving Sherwood Wright Professor of Geriatrics and the Director of the Office of Geriatric Research in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM). Dr. Reid obtained his medical degree from the University of South Carolina and then completed his internship and residency as well as a chief residency at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He completed fellowship training in both clinical epidemiology and geriatric medicine at Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at WCM in 2003, Dr. Reid taught and conducted research at Yale University. Dr. Reid has received many research awards over the years, including a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Scholar Award and a highly coveted Paul Beeson Faculty Scholar on Aging Research Award. He is also a section editor of the journal Pain Medicine and serves as specialty editor for Frontiers in Pain Research/Geriatric Medicine.
Dr. Reid’s work at TRIPLL supports translational research on pain and aging in New York City with institutional partners that include Cornell University (Ithaca), Columbia University, Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, LiveOn New York, and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. His research focuses on improving the management of pain among older persons. Current projects include 1) developing and testing behavioral therapies as a means of mitigating pain in older adults, 2) identifying barriers to the use of self-management strategies for pain in later life, and 3) examining optimal strategies for managing pain across ethnically diverse populations of older adults. Additional areas of interest include palliative care and the role of technology in improving the management of burdensome symptoms in later life.
Co-Director
Karl Pillemer, PhD
Professor, Cornell University, College of Human Ecology and Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Karl Pillemer is the Hazel E. Reed Professor in the Department of Human Development and Professor of Gerontology in Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College. He directs the Cornell Legacy Project and author of the book 30 Lessons for Living. His major interests center on human development over the life course, with a special emphasis on family and social relationships in middle age and beyond. He has a strong theoretical and empirical interest in life course transitions and the effects they have on family relationships. A major program of research is on family relations in later life, with a recent large-scale research project on family estrangement. He is the author of a book on the topic: Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. The second major program of research focuses on the nature and dynamics of family caregiving for impaired older relatives, which he has been carrying out over the past three decades with funding from the National Institutes of Health. A third area is in long-term care, inlcuding studies of the relationships between family members of residents with staff in long-term care facilities. Fourth, Dr. Pillemer has a long-term program of research on conflict and abuse in families of the aged, including several related studies of the domestic and institutional abuse of older persons. In recent years, Dr. Pillemer has explored the intersection of aging and climate change, including developing the evidence-based intervention Retirees in Service to the Environment. He is actively involved in intervention research and in policy analysis related to aging and health care, with an emphasis on evidence-based methods of developing a competent, caring long-term care workforce. His extension and outreach work involves translational research, exploring ways to speed the transfer of findings from basic research into scientifically tested interventions.
Co-Director, Co-Principal Investigator (MPI) and Director of the Pilot Study Core
Elaine Wethington, PhD
Professor Emeritus (Active), Cornell University, Departments of Human Development and of Sociology
Dr. Elaine Wethington is Professor Emeritus (Active) of Human Development, Sociology, and Gerontology in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. She is also adjunct research professor at the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan. Her major research interests include social relationships, integration, and isolation in midlife and older adulthood, and the role of stressful life events in affecting mental and physical health across the life course. Dr. Wethington’s current research focuses on health disparities among aging adults, and developing efficient measures of toxic stress in families, relationship transitions, and exposure to major and minor stressors that can be used in longitudinal studies in surveys, randomized controlled trials with frequent follow-up, and on smartphones.
Co-Investigator
Corinna Loeckenhoff, PhD
Professor, Cornell University, College of Human Ecology
Dr. Loeckenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Psychology (College of Human Ecology) at Cornell University and of Gerontology in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She completed her doctoral studies at Stanford University and postdoctoral training at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. Her research focuses on age differences in time horizons, personality, and emotional experience and their influence on mental and physical health across the life span. Her central goal is to understand how age groups differ in their approach to health-related choices and to explore ways to optimize such choices across the life span. Another line of research examines life-long trajectories in people’s personality traits and social cognition and their relation to health-related behaviors and outcomes. She is also interested in cross-cultural differences in aging trajectories.
Co-Investigator
Jeanne Teresi, EdD, PhD
Co-Director, Columbia University Stroud Center; Director, Data Coordinating Center Unit, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Department of Medicine, Division of General Medicine
Dr. Teresi co-directs the Columbia University Stroud Center at New York State Psychiatric Institute and is a member of the Faculty of Medicine. With doctorates in both Gerontology and Measurement and Statistics, Dr. Teresi has over 30 years of experience in medical and social research. She is a deputy editor of Medical Care, associate editor for statistics for Alzheimer Disease & Associated Disorders, and on the editorial boards of Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling and Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect. She also served on the editorial board of the Gerontologist, Psychology and Aging, and as an associate editor of Biometrics. She has been a member of the Weill Cornell Roybal Center for over a decade and is the Director of the Analytic Core to the Columbia University, National Institute on Aging- funded Alzheimer’s Disease-Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, and she has been a consultant to the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Statistical Center. She also leads the Measurement Methods and Analysis core of the Mount Sinai Pepper Center. Dr. Teresi was an invited panel member of the State of the Science Conference on End-of-Life Care, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Teresi is widely published, with over 300 peer-reviewed articles. She has been the Director or Co-Director of over 100 Data Coordinating Centers for large clinical trials and other multi-site studies, including the decade long National Institute on Aging studies of dementia special care in nursing homes, the CMS-funded Columbia University/SUNY Upstate Informatics in Diabetes and Telemedicine (IDEATel) study of elderly patients with diabetes, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke funded NYU/Columbia Center for Stroke Disparities Solutions (CSDS).
Co-Investigator
Mildred Ramirez, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Science at Columbia University, Department of Medicine
Dr. Ramirez is an Assistant Professor of Medical Science at Columbia University, Department of Medicine, and the former Associate Director of the Research Division at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, by RiverSpring Living. She is a community psychologist with a specialization in social gerontology. Dr. Ramirez is well-versed in measurement and methodological issues as they relate to health disparities and cross-cultural research. She has expertise in qualitative and quantitative methods applied in survey instrument development, and in applications of classical test theory methods of scale construction. Dr. Ramirez has collaborated in conducting analysis related to the evaluation and development of culture-fair measures and has led the development of Spanish versions of patient and staff instruments for several multi-site studies. Substantive areas of publication are on minority aging and on measurement issues as they relate to health, mental health, and cognitive assessments in cross-cultural research. Her research interests also include health disparities, racial and ethnic diversity, and multicultural issues in long term care, particularly ethnic conflict in nursing home staff/resident relations.
Co-Investigator
Catherine Riffin, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychology in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine
Dr. Catherine Riffin is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in Medicine in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her research lies at the intersection of family caregiving and clinical practice with a goal of developing scalable and efficacious strategies for support person- and family-centered care. In her current work, she is leading initiatives to improve pain control among persons with dementia; for example, by training family caregivers in pain assessment and communication techniques. She is also designing a system for primary care that will help health care providers to identify caregivers’ unmet needs. Beyond the substantive focus of her work, Dr. Riffin has expertise in stakeholder engaged study designs, theoretical underpinnings of behavior change, and intervention development and evaluation in real-world settings. She also has significant experience conducting mixed methods research to address complex multilevel research questions and aid the development and evaluation of mechanism-driven interventions.
Co-Investigator
Jerad Moxley, PhD
Assistant Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine, Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Center on Aging and Behavioral Research
Dr. Moxley has published research articles on expert decision making, expert skill acquisition, forecasting skill, depression, predictors of student learning, scale development predictors of dementia, dyslexia, caregiving, HIV patients, effects of technology on older adults, and Medical performance. He has strong experience in applying verbal protocols to study human decision making and memory and scale development methods. He has performed data analysis for many research papers using methods including, mixture modeling, cross-validated lasso regression, Bayesian multiple regression, meta-analysis, growth mixture models, structural equation modeling, nonparametric statistics, and linear mixed models.