Dr. Seplaki's overarching goals are to understand how challenges in the social and physical environment interact with the biological processes of aging, and how to translate that understanding into effective interventions that reduce disability and mortality among older adults. His research, spanning both the individual and population level, encompasses physical and social characteristics of the home environment that support or challenge elders, life stressors, and socioeconomic status, and examines how these factors are related to changes in biological indicators of several physiological systems and self-reports of physical and mental health. Key themes in his work include an emphasis on measurement and estimation issues and a focus on subclinical disease processes related to geriatric frailty and allostatic load, including development of measures of health risk related to multi-system dysregulation. Taken together, Dr. Seplaki's research seeks to provide an integrated perspective on trajectories of health in late life and, ultimately, identify opportunities to reduce disability and mortality and improve the ability of older adults to continue to live independently.
