Episode 9: Dr. Laura Girling

Amy Barnes21min

Dr. Ian Anson00:04

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

Dr. Ian Anson00:39

Here in Maryland we have four spectacular seasons. After a springtime bursting with flowers, sunshine, and the return of our avian waterfowl, we find ourselves basking in the scorching heat and humidity of a Chesapeake summer. While those hot days and nights might sometimes seem interminable, eventually, we find ourselves in the golden glow of autumn, before the frosty chill of a Maryland winter tantalizes us with the hope that snowflakes might softly fill our streets and parks. As we get closer to the end of our first season of Retrieving the Social Sciences, the changing of the seasons also reminds us of an inevitable fact of life. We're all getting imperceptibly older, each and every day. Aging is a beautiful part of what makes us human. However, oftentimes this process is overlooked in our personal lives, and in scientific research. The elderly, who have experienced this journey more fully than any of the rest of us are more than founts of wisdom for younger generations. They also have important lessons to teach us in the realm of the Social Sciences.

Dr. Ian Anson01:55

On this week's episode of Retrieving the Social Sciences, I'm delighted to feature a conversation I recently had with Dr. Laura Girling, Director of the Center for Aging Studies at UMBC. Not only is Dr. Girling affiliated with the Hilltop Institute at UMBC, she is also an assistant research scientist for the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health. Her research specializes in aging populations living in contexts where they're vulnerable. Her numerous works include studies of older adults living with Type 2 diabetes, and those living alone with dementia to name a couple of topics. Dr. Girling recently made headlines when the National Institute of Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health, awarded her over $750,000 in grants to further her research. Using this funding, she's currently studying how populations with dementia live, especially those who live alone. In our recent conversation, we learned much more about aging, Alzheimer's, and related dementias, and the ways in which social science can help us improve the lives of elders in our communities. Let's take a listen.

Dr. Ian Anson03:11

Dr. Girling, I want to thank you again, so much for taking the time to be with us today. I'm really excited to hear more about your research. And I certainly want to get into some of the details of your work on aging and dementia. Before we get into too many details of the work that you're doing. I kind of want to ask a little bit about your background and kind of how you got interested in these topics in the first place.

Dr. Laura Girling03:32

So I have always been interested in the aging population since I was very little. I knew whatever I did that I wanted to work with older adults. So that has been something that's been very innate with me. In terms of dementia, I was introduced during my master's in clinical psychology, I did a rotation in neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. And I worked in the critical function lab and the medical psychology clinic. And there I worked with renowned experts in the field of dementia like Jason Brandt and Marilyn Albert and I was part of their projects, all of their dementia projects and actually ended up running most of them towards the end. And that exposure, when I knew I guess it was two years or so working with them. I knew that I wanted to do dementia research of my own and the potential to be funded by NIH, I was truly hoping would be something I'd be able to do. And that did come to fruition.

Dr. Ian Anson04:33

Yeah, that's wonderful. And I certainly want to talk a little bit more about that grant in just a moment. But yeah, I think that you really strike it in that response. The sort of fact that this research is really kind of straddling two worlds in some respects, right, you've got kind of the medical side of research on Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. And of course, that is probably what most people, kind of a general audience, might be immediately thinking of when they're thinking of this kind of research. But of course, this is a podcast about the social science and you also, I think, could probably be considered a social scientist as well. And I want to make some inroads into that question about how your research investigates these kind of social understandings of the disease, how we might be able to better improve outcomes for people not simply through, you know, investigating the actual medical sort of aspects of the disease, but also understanding all the social science that is peripheral to those to those understandings. Can you speak a little bit on that topic?

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