UH widens
research into agingManoa's chancellor takes
administrative steps to reorganize
the gerontology center
The University of Hawaii-Manoa is planning to move its Center on Aging to a new home and give it a broader mission.
UH Chancellor Peter Englert said he will ask the Board of Regents to relocate the center from the public health department of the John A. Burns School of Medicine to the School of Social Work.
"This center was on my horizon for a long, long time," Englert said. "We're very aware the study of aging is very important for our society nowadays."
Kathryn Braun, a tenured public health faculty member, is on loan to the center as director. The only university funding for the program is $30,000 for a secretary, she said.
Braun said she raises an average of $300,000 a year in grants to support the center's projects. "There is a big demand but very little funding for aging.
"The population is getting older, and we need to pay attention to this issue," she said. "We're just so thrilled that the chancellor is interested in gerontology. He understands it is a major issue for Hawaii, the Pacific, the world."
Englert noted that he helped to establish a center for the study of aging when he was an administrator and dean at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. It was run predominantly by the school of psychology and expanded to other university areas, he said.
He said he was at a meeting here about a year ago with more than 20 researchers and others interested in the study of aging, but they were not coordinated.
He said the School of Social Work offered to host the center, and he has asked Interim Dean Jon Matsuoka to initiate the paperwork.
"This is a slow process, but the nucleus is there and it will be preserved," Englert said. "That has to be the starting point.
"The study of aging is so important we will now make it a theme, something that goes across the university, and try to organize all our researchers through that center and coordinate them so that we are now able to write larger proposals and interest public and private foundations and other sources of funding in the research we can be doing at this university."
Englert said multidisciplinary approaches should be taken to address issues of society and aging research should span all aspects -- biological, social and environmental.
DeWolfe Miller, chairman of the Public Health Department, said if the chancellor and Braun feel the center is a better fit in the School of Social Work, he supports the move.
Braun said Englert has allocated $8,000 to the School of Social Work to develop a business plan for raising money to support a center on aging. "We have lots of pieces of the plan already."
She said when the center was established by the Board of Regents in 1988, it had 3 1/4 staff members and a large budget and was under the executive vice president for academic affairs.
When the university decentralized, the center was placed in the public health department, "but the budget somehow disappeared for the Center on Aging," she said.
It has operated since 1993 with only the paid secretary and her position on loan to run it, she said. Six gerontologists are working on projects under grants.
The center offers two certificate programs in gerontology, one for undergraduates and one for graduates, she said. Since 1995 it has had 75 graduates with advanced certificates, and three or four more are graduating this semester, she said.
The center also coordinates research, does training, holds workshops and provides consulting services.
Braun said the center attracts social workers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, psychologists and sociologists who are "interested in the broader view of gerontology. We discuss cases from an interdisciplinary point of view."
