We are ready for another exciting academic year, and we wish everyone a warm welcome back! Please do join our Welcome Back Lunch, Wednesday, September 2. The lunch will be held at noon in our Seminar Room, 310 Social Sciences, during our regular Brown Bag slot. We are delighted to welcome new and returning faculty, affiliates, staff, and students for the 2026–2027 academic year. Food and drink will be provided.
Our first Brown Bag Seminar of the semester is Wednesday, September 9, with Mathew E. Hauer (Florida State University) and Tyler H. McCormick (University of Washington), who will co-present, “AI and Demography.” Event details. The fall Brown Bag schedule is also available and will continue to be updated.
Macroeconomic Effects of Population Aging. Join us for our online workshop on the macroeconomic effects of population aging, to be held September 18, 2026, 8am to 2:30 p.m. Pacific. This workshop is hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-organized by the NIA-supported Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) and the NBER Center for Aging and Health Research. See the agenda, which also links to the livestream. You may also watch on the NBER YouTube channel.
Call for Abstracts: 2027 Workshop on Determinants of Adult Mortality, Morbidity, and Healthy Aging in LMICs. We invite abstracts for presentation at the 2027 Workshop on Determinants of Adult Mortality, Morbidity, and Healthy Aging in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, to be held virtually on Friday, February 26, 2027. The workshop is jointly sponsored by the NIA-supported UC Berkeley Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) and the USC/UCLA Center for Biodemography and Population Health (CBPH). One-page abstracts are due October 16, 2026 and should be sent to ceda@berkeley.edu. Further information is in the attached call.NIH:
NIH Request for Information: Proposed Changes to Reporting Outcomes from NIH Peer Review. NIH is seeking comment on a proposal to stop releasing numerical overall impact scores to applicants, institutions, and program staff, and instead to place discussed applications in one of two categories (Most Competitive (top 25 percent) or Competitive (26–50 percent)) based on the final overall impact score, with undiscussed applications reported as Not Discussed. NIH frames the change as aligning peer review reporting with the Unified Funding Strategy by emphasizing substantive expert feedback over numerical scores (NOT-OD-26-088). Comments are due October 13, 2026.
Submitting Applications with International Collaborations. In 2025, NIH updated its Policy on Foreign Subawards and introduced the Collaborative International Research application and award structure using the PF5 activity code. Beginning with application due dates on or after September 25, 2026, applicants proposing foreign collaborations to one of our participating specialized funding opportunities can leverage the application forms and structure of the PF5 Parent, but follow the due dates, opportunity requirements, review criteria, and other aspects of the specialized funding opportunity-of-interest (Parent PF5 Leveraging Model Instructions).
NIH Request for Information: Funding Approaches to Support the Development of Future Clinical Trial Investigators. NIH is discontinuing support for “Independent Clinical Trial Required” mentored K awards: K funding will no longer support conducting clinical trials, feasibility studies, or ancillary studies to existing trials, though early-career researchers may still take part in clinical trial research led by their mentors, and those seeking to lead trials as principal investigators will need other funding. NIH is seeking input on potential approaches to developing future clinical trial investigators, including how clinical trial research experiences should be structured within mentored K awards (NOT-OD-26-095). Comments are due September 30, 2026.
See further announcements and opportunities below.
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FUNDING
Grand Challenges: Multiplex Platforms to Assess Indicators of Micronutrient Status, Inflammation and Infectious Disease. The Gates Foundation, through its Global Grand Challenges program, is accepting applications for projects that develop or improve low-cost multiplex assay platforms able to measure biomarkers of micronutrient status, inflammation, and infectious disease simultaneously from a single small sample, for population surveillance in reference laboratories in low- and middle-income countries. Priorities include extending existing nutritional biomarker panels to vitamins B9 and B12 using novel binding molecules and, under the more ambitious of two tracks, adding vitamin B1 and B2 status and red blood cell folate. Proposals must address defined analyte or performance targets, demonstrate a novel analytical approach, and include a feasible implementation plan for reference laboratories; incremental improvements, commercialization-only efforts, and basic research without translational relevance are out of scope. Awards come at two scales: up to $200,000 over 12 months, or up to $800,000 over as much as 24 months. Applications are due September 8, 2026, 11:30 a.m. PDT. Challenge details and application.
NIH COMMIT Challenge. The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health is launching the COMpetency in Menopause & Integrated Therapy (COMMIT) Challenge, a national prize competition with a $2.5 million prize purse to identify and reward exemplary menopause-related curricula across U.S. health education and professional training programs. The challenge invites submissions of evidence-based, scalable, competency-aligned curricula from across disciplines that improve menopause care, including courses, workshops, seminar or webinar series, coaching and mentoring models, immersive training experiences, and supervised clinical training programs. Programs may qualify by demonstrating structured, comprehensive training models that enhance provider knowledge, support team-based care, and advance women’s health across the menopausal transition. The competition opens in fall 2026. Challenge details.
NIH Highlighted Topics
Interventions to Promote Health by Fostering Connectedness
Posted Date: August 11, 2026
Expiration Date: August 11, 2028
Time-Sensitive Research Opportunities in Environmental Health Sciences
Posted Date: August 10, 2026
Expiration Date: August 10, 2028
Characterizing Indoor Exposures to Advance Exposome Research
Posted Date: July 9, 2026
Expiration Date: July 9, 2028
CALLS
Call for Abstracts. Aftermath of a Pandemic: Changes in Mortality and Health, an international workshop, will be held January 28–29, 2027 at Oslo Metropolitan University. Organized by the University of Zurich, Oslo Metropolitan University, Roskilde University, and the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Epidemics and Contagious Diseases: The Legacy of the Past, with support from COST Action GREATLEAP (CA22116), the workshop takes up the mid- and long-term consequences of pandemics, which are far less well documented than their acute effects. Topics include how mortality patterns and causes of death shift after a pandemic and whether those changes are structured by socio-demographic and socio-economic factors; demographic effects on life expectancy, birth rates, and age-specific mortality; interactions with the epidemiology of other infectious diseases, including out-of-season epidemics following disrupted transmission and altered population immunity; the restructuring of health systems and changes in hospitalization; lasting physical and psychological consequences for survivors; and the long-term health of those exposed in utero. Submissions are a 300-word abstract in English with title, authors, and affiliations, due September 11, 2026, with notification of acceptance by October 1, 2026. Attendance is capped at 25 participants, and the organizers plan to pursue a journal special issue afterward. Limited travel and accommodation funding is available to members of COST Action GREATLEAP, with priority to early-career researchers presenting at the workshop; requests are made in the submission form. Submit an abstract. Questions may be directed to Katarina Matthes at katarina.matthes@iem.uzh.ch.
Call for Papers. Studies in Family Planning is accepting submissions for a special issue on “Pandemic and Epidemic Impacts on Reproduction, Sexual and Reproductive Health, and Family Dynamics: Longer-Term Consequences and Cross-Crisis Perspectives.” The issue seeks to move past the short-term, COVID-centered focus of much recent work by situating the pandemic among other health crises with documented reproductive consequences, such as the Zika and mpox outbreaks, and by inviting longer-term and cross-crisis analyses of fertility, partnership and caregiving dynamics, and access to sexual and reproductive health services. The editors particularly welcome work foregrounding gender and reproductive rights, and work bridging the divide between fertility research concentrated in the Global North and service-access research concentrated in the Global South. Manuscripts should follow the journal’s author guidelines, stay at or below 8,000 words, and be submitted through the journal portal tagged for the special issue. Submissions are due September 15, 2026. Full call for papers.
Call for Abstracts. Mobility Trajectories across the Life Course: New Directions in the Sociology of Population, XXI World Congress of Sociology, to be held July 4–10, 2027 in Gwangju, Korea. The session brings together research that treats mobility not as an isolated migration event or a static distinction between movers and stayers, but as a dynamic life-course process shaped by the timing, sequencing, duration, and interconnectedness of residential, internal, and international moves. Theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions are welcome on the antecedents, mechanisms, patterns, and consequences of mobility trajectories, and on the interdependence of mobility with family, educational, occupational, housing, and health trajectories. The organizers particularly encourage work on the long-term consequences of mobility for socioeconomic attainment, health, and well-being; the role of family ties and linked lives in shaping mobility trajectories; the lasting influence of childhood mobility on adult outcomes; and methodological innovations for measuring and analyzing complex mobility histories, with comparative, longitudinal, sequence-analytic, causal, and mixed-methods approaches especially welcome. Submissions are due October 14, 2026. Submit an abstract to this session · full call for abstracts.
Call for Papers. The 4th International Conference on Prolonging Working Life, Towards Sustainable Working Lives in Times of Demographic Changes, will be held April 15–16, 2027 at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Helsinki, Finland, in hybrid format, with presentations on site or online. The conference is organized by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in collaboration with the PEROSH network and the LIFECON and SustAgeable projects of the Finnish DEMOGRAPHY Programme. A pre-conference workshop, “Introduction to Multistate Modelling,” will be held on April 14, 2027. Abstract submission is now open; instructions are in the submission form, and conference topics are listed on the conference website. Submit an abstract by November 30, 2026. Questions may be directed to Svetlana Solovieva (svetlana.solovieva@ttl.fi) or Taina Leinonen (taina.leinonen@ttl.fi), Chief Researchers at FIOH.
CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
AI and Machine Learning in Dementia Research. Virtual webinar, September 3, 2026, 9:00–10:00 a.m. Pacific / 12:00–1:00 p.m. Eastern. The webinar is co-organized by the Center for Advancing Sociodemographic and Economic Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (CeASES ADRD), the USC Resource Center for Aging and Dementia Research (USC RCAD), and the USC-Yale Roybal Center for Behavioral Interventions in Aging. Webinar details · register.
Community Infrastructures and Diabetes Disaster Resilience in Aging Adults in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Cydney McGuire (Indiana University) and Hugh Roland and Azar Abadi (University of Alabama at Birmingham) will present on September 3, 2026, 1:00 p.m. Mountain / 3:00 p.m. Eastern / 12:00 p.m. Pacific. Rather than presenting findings, the seminar discusses the research practices and decisions behind an ongoing pilot study of the community-level factors shaping a critical component of diabetes management for aging adults: consistency in care. During natural disasters, uncertainty and complexity jeopardize consistent diabetes management, with possible disability and death as consequences. Learn more.
Long-Term Care Data Cooperative Office Hours. Virtual, September 10, 2026, 1:00–2:00 p.m. Eastern. The NIA-funded Long-Term Care (LTC) Data Cooperative is a novel data resource that assembles electronic health record data from skilled nursing facilities and assisted living communities. Office hours are held monthly. Learn more and register.
Measuring Disability and Functioning in Studies of Aging. Hybrid, October 8, 2026, 12:00–4:00 p.m. Eastern, at the University of Michigan and online. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Network for Innovative Methods in Longitudinal Aging Studies (NIMLAS) and the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA). NIMLAS members receive a calendar invitation for the event; to join, complete the membership application form. Workshop details.
2026 MCH Symposium: Reproductive Realities — Are Families Achieving Their Desired Size? Hybrid, November 18, 2026, 1:00–5:30 p.m. Eastern, in Kresge G1 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (677 Huntington Ave., Boston) and online. Hosted by the school’s Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence and co-sponsored by the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, the symposium examines fertility patterns in the United States and the gap between desired and achieved family size. Claudia Goldin delivers the keynote, with presentations by Karen Guzzo, Alison Gemmill, and Jennifer Glass, followed by a panel moderated by journalist Bryce Covert. Registration is required. Symposium details and registration. Questions may be directed to mchconcentration@hsph.harvard.