Eileen Crimmins, Ph.D. is the Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology. Professor Crimmins received her Ph.D. in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the director of the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health. This Center is a unique collaboration between demographers, paychologists, epidemiologists, sociologists, physicians and biologists at USC and UCLA. The purpose of the NIA funded Center is to integrate medical, biological, and epidemiological information to model and predict population health trends and explain health differences. The Center provides pilot project money for relevant research and promotes a series of seminars and workshops.

Professor Crimmins currently has a second project supported by NIA that also links biology and demography; “Educational differences in Biological Risk" which is being undertaken with Teresa Seeman. This project examines how markers of biological risk can be used to explain the poorer health outcomes of older people with less education and lower incomes. Biological risk includes factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, homocysteine, antioxidants, fibrinogen, and CRP.

Involved in numerous professional activities, Professor Crimmins is on the Board of Councilors for the National Center for Health Statistics, she is a member of NIA Monitoring Committee for HRS and AHEAD. She is Vice-President of the Population Association of America, Chair of the Section on Aging and the Life Course of the American Sociological Association, and Secretary- Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Social Biology. She serves as Associate Editor for a number of journals. She also recently published a book on Determining Health Expectancies.

Professor Crimmins teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level, including courses on research metods, stress health and aging, and the Biodemography of Aging.