Center Directors and Core Leads

Debra Umberson is a Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Umberson is the Principal Investigator and Director of CAPS and Co-Director of the Network Core and served as Director of the Population Research Center from 2015-2020. Dr. Umberson’s trans-disciplinary research focuses on the impact of the social environment on mental and physical health across the life course, with attention to diversity associated with gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual minority status.

Karen Fingerman is the Wilson Regents Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, and a Faculty Research Associate with the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Fingerman is the Director of the Texas Aging and Longevity Center and Co-Director of CAPS, the Communication and Dissemination Core, and the Development Core.  She is a family demographer and lifespan psychologist whose research specializes in family relationships and social integration, with recent work focusing on social interactions and experiences in the daily lives of older adults. 

Mateo Farina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and a Faculty Research Associate with the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Farina is the Associate Director of CAPS and Co-Director of the Network Core. Dr. Farina also directs a research lab examining the life course origins of dementia risk and biological aging. His work focuses on health and health disparities across racial and ethnic groups, healthy life expectancies across demographic and geographic populations, and the ways life course pathways vary across contexts. His work aligns with the CAPS research themes of Biosocial Processes and Socioeconomic and Institutional Contexts.

Robert Crosnoe is the Rapoport Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas, he has appointments in the Department of Sociology, Population Research Center, and Department of Psychology and previously served as the Senior Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and the Chair of the Department of Sociology.  Dr. Crosnoe is the Director of Research for the CAPS Program Development and Pilot Core. His main research areas are human development, education, family, and health with a specific interest in the experiences of children, adolescents, and young adults and how they are stratified by their families’ socioeconomic circumstances and migration histories.

Audrey Duarte is a Professor and Associate Chair for Academic Affairs in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Duarte is the Associate Director for the CAPS Administrative Core. Dr. Duarte is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses multiple, complementary neuroscience methods including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neuropsychological methods (i.e. neurological patients), to understand the neural mechanisms of age-related changes in episodic memory, which is memory for personally experienced events. The major aim of her research program is to understand the neural changes that underlie age-related decline in episodic memory, why some people age better, from a neural and cognitive perspective, than others, and to develop and implement effective interventions to alleviate this decline. 

Chandra Muller is a Professor, Alma Cowden Madden Centennial Professorship, Ashbel Smith Professorship, in the Department of Sociology at The Unviersity of Texas at Austin. Dr. Muller is the Director of the CAPS Communication and Dissemination Core. Her research is on how schools and education shape inequalities in later life work, health, and cognitive aging. Her research has focused in inequalities related to gender, race and ethnicity, social class, as well as disability, immigration and language minority status in education. She is currently leading (with collaborators Eric Grodsky and Rob Warren) two nationally representative, longitudinal studies, the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972 (NLS-72), that follow people first interviewed as high school students into later life.