 Linda P. Fried, MD 1979, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University |
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of Americans aged 65 and older will more than double by 2030. Nowhere is this shifting demographic felt more acutely than in health care. As a practicing geriatrician, researcher, educator and public health advocate, one Rush alumna works not only to enhance the health of these aging Americans, but also to change our very approach to working with aging adults. |
Linda P. Fried, MD 1979, dean, DeLamar Professor of Public Health, and professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, has dedicated her career to the science of healthy aging, especially prevention of frailty, disability and cardiovascular diseases.
An internationally renowned scientist, Fried has established the definition of frailty, its causes and its potential for prevention as keys to optimizing health for older adults. She anticipates that as the senior population expands, not only will health care providers need to expand their capacity to care effectively for people as they age, but broader communities may need to rethink the role of seniors in our society.
Being an aging society can bring great benefits for us to harness,” Fried said. “How we perceive many of the challenges we’re confronted with — like Medicare and social security — would be substantively altered if we were aware of how beneficial an aging society could be. I spent a lot of time designing a model that demonstrates what older adults can bring to society.”
Fried on Experience Corps and Harnessing the Capabilities of Aging Adults
The result of that thoughtful design was Experience Corps, an award-winning national program that engages people over 55 in meeting their communities’ greatest challenges. Experience Corps members tutor and mentor elementary school students, help teachers in the classroom and lead after-school enrichment activities. The program is, simultaneously, designed to be a high impact health promotion program for the older volunteers. Independent research has shown that the program has improved students’ academic performance and enhanced the well-being of the older adults who volunteer.
“In co-founding Experience Corps, Marc Freedman [founder and CEO of Civic Ventures] and I wanted to demonstrate that we could create meaningful new roles for older adults that meet critical needs,” Fried said. “Aging often intensifies a real desire to leave the world better than one found it. Unfortunately, older adults often find there aren’t many roles for them in society to make a difference. My theory was that if we created those roles for older adults in the community, we could keep older people engaged and active in ways that would also promote their own health and strengthen the community.”
What was launched in 1995 as a pilot program in five cities now boasts 2,000 volunteers helping 20,000 students throughout 23 U.S. cities. Clinical trials conducted at Johns Hopkins have shown that older adults volunteering in the program report that they’re more physically active, experience fewer falls, and feel stronger and healthier than they did prior to participation in the program.
Fried Named Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia UniversityIn parallel with the expansion of this program and her groundbreaking research on frailty, Fried’s career has expanded as well. Last year, Fried left Johns Hopkins, where she directed the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, the Program in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging and the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, to become dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. There, she has made health promotion across the lifecourse a major goal in the school’s strategic plan and plans to continue her frailty and disability research.
Fried on the Rush Medical College ExperienceFried credits Rush Medical College with providing the foundation for much of this groundbreaking work.
“I received a great clinical education at Rush, both as a medical student and as a resident,” she said. “That education was very much focused on being a meticulous clinician who was totally focused on the patient’s needs and goals, but it also exposed me to epidemiology and taught me to be meticulous about the information collected, which has had an immense impact on my work as both a practitioner and researcher.”
