Research Across the Lifespan

Yale’s Lifespan program explores the rising field of lifespan research — a new approach to examining the ways in which diseases that commonly strike adults have their roots in infancy and early childhood. Lifespan research seeks to identify risk factors in early childhood that can cause health problems later. While developing strategies to ensure appropriate inclusion by all ages. We are taking a lifespan perspective on how diseases emerge in order to enable earlier diagnosis and intervention, and the capacity to lessen the impact of disease as people age, by exploring how biology is adapted to a given period or context, but then becomes a disease later in life. We will leverage the historical and programmatic strengths of the Yale Schools of Nursing and Public Health; the School of Medicine Child Study Center, Department of Pediatrics, and the Program on Aging; the Institute for Global Health; and faculty from the Yale College Departments of Psychology and Anthropology.

The YCCI has served as a vehicle to bring investigators together to advance the Lifespan Initiative. This effort has laid the foundation for sustained research into the lifelong impacts of healthy early development as well as exposure to early life adversity.

This initiative has achieved many notable successes during this funding cycle, including the following:

1. establishment of the Lifespan Pilot grants;
2. the launch of the Early Stress and Adversity Consortium;
3. the launch of the Gesell lectures that focus on the impact of early stress and adversity on development across the lifespan.

Lifespan Research: Impact of Childhood Disease on Adult Health