Everyone living in the Circumpolar North should have the opportunity to live a long
and healthy life. However, we live in an environment that can be challenging as we
get older. The physical environment may be difficult to navigate (extreme weather,
changing climate, high costs of living, etc) but it is important to remember that
the social environment also changes for us as we age. As more adults are choosing
to age-in-place and retire at home here in Alaska, we are noticing real gaps in our
knowledge about what healthy aging means to our elders and how we can achieve it in
our Arctic environment.
The Healthy Aging Lab at UAA works to understand the shifting sociocultural landscape
for aging adults and identify service needs to facilitate healthy aging-in-place.
We do this in a variety of ways, from Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
projects, to community-engaged courses in health sciences, to individual service-learning
projects—our work aims to benefit not only the student (and future geriatric workforce),
but the senior community as well.
The Alaska Victimization Survey (AVS) released a new report about the health of women who have experienced Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Physical violence is a part of IPV, but it also includes things like controlling behaviors, threats of harm, and inflicting harm against people and things an intimate partner cares about. Dr. Ingrid Johnson with AVS told the Alaska Beacon these sorts of behaviors can have a lasting impact.
Restorative justice is a form of resolution that allows victims of crimes to work with the criminal justice system to address and correct the harm caused. UAA’s Ingrid Johnson from the Justice Center and Rei Shimizu from the School of Social Work spoke to the Alaska Beacon about how restorative justice can be used in cases of domestic violence.
Dr. Tina DeLapp, a UAA emerita Professor of Nursing, and Pheobe Bales, a legal studies student, have received awards for their outstanding achievements in philanthropy.
This year's annual Crime in Alaska report was recently released. Brad Myrstol, Justice Center Professor and Alaska Justice Information Center Director, discussed the data compiled from police agencies across the state with Anchorage Daily News.
UAA Justice Center Professor and Alaska Justice Information Center Director, Brad Myrstol, spoke with KNBA about the disproportionally high number of Alaska Native and American Indian inmates in the Alaskan and U.S. prison system.
The UAA Healthy Aging Research Laboratory is partially supported by an Institutional
Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number 2P20GM103395. The content
is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official
views of Alaska INBRE.