Faculty Profiles

BIO

Jessica Faul is a Research Associate Professor at the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan. She is the co-director of the Biospecimen Lab at ISR, and is affiliated with the Michigan Center on Demography and Aging (MiCDA), the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health (CSEPH), and the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. Her work focuses on socioeconomic predictors of health and health inequalities across the life course. Her research integrates biological, genetic and social science data to examine determinants of health and cognitive function at older ages. Dr. Faul is a co-Investigator on the Health and Retirement Study and is responsible for overseeing nearly all of the core operations of HRS and has been an integral player in all of the HRS biomarker and genomic data collection and analytic efforts. As the co-director of the ISR Biospecimen Lab, Dr. Faul routinely advises on biological data collection protocols for other large-scale population-based studies to help ensure high quality and valid assessment of biological data collected in the field. Dr. Faul currently co-leads the NIA-sponsored Biomarker Network which aims to develop an interdisciplinary group of scientists dedicated to improved measurement of biological risk for late life health outcomes in large population-representative samples.