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October 21, 2024

Kenneth Langa elected to National Academy of Medicine

Along with three other UM faculty, Kenneth Langa was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Langa’s work centers on one of the largest medical, economic and social issues facing the nation: dementia, and its forerunner, cognitive impairment.

As a primary care physician and social scientist, he has led numerous studies advancing understanding of the risk factors, prevalence, outcomes and trends of these conditions in the United States and beyond. His work has documented significant disparities by race, education, and wealth. He has translated this work into data sources and analytical methods that researchers, clinicians and policymakers can use to identify strategies to prevent cognitive decline, and understand the full impact of dementia on patients, families, and societies.

He co-directs the Health and Retirement Study, the largest and longest-running national longitudinal study of U.S. adults. He recently co-led the effort to win a $195 million renewal of the National Institute on Aging grant that funds the HRS — the largest research grant ever received by U-M. In addition to using data from the HRS in his own work, he co-leads an international effort to harmonize HRS data with data from similar studies in other countries.

In addition to his more than 350 peer-reviewed research publications and 24 years of clinical care for veterans at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, he has mentored dozens of early-career researchers across U-M. He was previously elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received the Distinguished Clinical and Translational Research Mentor Award from the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research.

A member of the U-M faculty since 1999, he is a past member of the VA Center for Clinical Management Research, and current member of the Institute of Gerontology at the U-M Geriatrics Center, the Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer’s, the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging, and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. He has served on two NAM committees related to dementia prevention and is a current member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population.

Langa is a graduate of Amherst College and the University of Chicago’s schools of public policy and medicine, and completed his residency and health services research training at U-M, the latter though the forerunner of today’s National Clinician Scholars Program.