Faculty Profiles

BIO

Kate Duchowny, PhD, MPH is a social epidemiologist and Research Assistant Professor in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She is a faculty member in the Social Environment & Health Research Group and an affiliate of the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA). Her research integrates social epidemiology with the biology of aging to examine how life course exposures, such as trauma, socioeconomic conditions, and neighborhood environments, become biologically embedded and shape musculoskeletal health, physical functioning, and cognitive health in older adults. Her work is organized around two lines of inquiry: (1) identifying which aspects of the built and social environment matter most for helping older adults maintain independence and physical mobility, and (2) examining sociobiologic mechanisms across the life course, such as viral infections and mitochondrial function, that drive disparate outcomes in physical and cognitive functioning. Underlying both lines of inquiry is a strong interest in developing scalable, reproducible measures of mitochondrial function and other biomarkers of aging for use in large population health surveys and existing biorepositories to deepen our understanding of how social exposures shape physical and cognitive health across the life course.