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Who We Are
In 1995, James W. Vaupel established the Program on Population, Policy, and Aging (PPPA) at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy following discussions with the Sanford Institute Director and the Dean of Arts & Sciences. The Program (the forerunner of PPARC) was designed to facilitate the performance of demographic and biodemographic research related to aging, especially through NIA grant support. (NIA is one of the National Institutes of Health.) In 2006, the ten-year-old Program became the Population, Policy and Aging Research Center (PPARC) with its administrative and physical home at the Terry Sanford Institute.
Vaupel was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
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Note: The demographer pictured at the top left, Väinö Kannisto, was deeply interested in longevity and aging. He not only wrote the first Odense Monograph on Population Aging in 1994, entitled: Development of Oldest-old Mortality, 1950-1990; but also wrote the first article to appear in a new journal launched in 1999, Demographic Research, Finnish Life Tables since 1751. Vaupel started both the monograph series and the journal. Vaupel also saw that the data that Kannisto tracked down was made widely available through the Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality (see PO1 AG008761 0001).