The Schoeni TRENDS lecture is an annual lecture on late-life health trends in memory of Robert F. Schoeni, who founded and organized MiCDA’s TRENDS network for nearly two decades. The TRENDS lecture aims to highlight research on important health-related demographic trends by an emerging scholar.
View This Year’s Lecture
The lecture for 2026 was “Trends Among the U.S. Latino Immigrant Population: Implications for Older Adult Health and Well-Being.” This year’s speaker was Mara Getz Sheftel, and the discussant was Neil Mehta. Registration is now closed.
Mara Getz Sheftel is a demographer and sociologist who leverages life course and health disparities frameworks to study how large-scale social changes intersect with global population aging to impact older adult health in vulnerable populations. Her research is published in Demography, Population Research & Policy Review, the Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, and Socius, among other peer-reviewed journals.
Neil Mehta’s research interests focus on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic health disparities and the modelling of complex population health dynamics. His prior work has contributed to understanding the contributions of obesity and cigarette smoking to mortality and disability levels, the mechanisms through which health disparities arise, and healthy life expectancy. Dr. Mehta co-organizes MiCDA’s network on TRENDS in Old-Age Disability.