Colter Mitchell
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
How do the circumstances people grow up in get under the skin and shape their health decades later? Research here follows large, nationally representative groups of Americans over many years, linking what happens in their families, neighborhoods and economies to measurements taken from their blood and DNA.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Genetics
- Topics
biological aging
DNA methylation
epigenetics
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Compare short-term health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes among essential workers, non-essential workers, and people who lost jobs during the 2020 pandemic, using Fragile Families cohort parents and young adults.
- Investigate how pandemic mitigation efforts affected family and intergenerational relationships and access to health resources, using repeated interviews with 700 parent-adult child pairs.
- Analyze how transmission levels and state and local pandemic policies relate to individual health, and whether those links differ by contextual factors such as historical redlining.
- Harmonize survey and biomarker data across the Health and Retirement Study, Add Health and the Fragile Families cohort, covering blood assays, DNA methylation on the Illumina EPIC chip, and RNA sequencing.
- Test how aging biomarkers such as IL-6, CRP, GDF15 and hbA1c correlate with one another across the life course and across sex, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
- Test whether immune-cell DNA methylation measured at ages 9 and 15 and gene expression measured in young adulthood predict later adult biomarkers of aging.
More about the research
Two strands run in parallel: tracing how the 2020 pandemic and the policies around it rippled through the lives of families already at economic risk, and working out which biological markers actually track aging across the whole life course and whether they connect early-life conditions to later health.
Why it matters
Both projects aim to show how social and economic conditions translate into measurable health differences. Findings on the pandemic could inform which groups future mitigation policies need to protect, since essential workers, people who lost jobs, and families in historically redlined areas may have fared very differently. The aging work could identify blood, methylation and RNA markers that flag accelerated aging long before symptoms appear, pointing to earlier windows for intervention. Harmonized data and shared datasets are made available to other researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
The longitudinal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related multi-level mitigation and contextual factors on health and socioeconomic outcomes of individuals and families from a vulnerable population
NIH · Sep 2022 – Apr 2027
Biological Aging Across the Life Course: Harmonizing Cohort Biospecimen Archives
NIH · Mar 2021 – Feb 2027
Closest labs
Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Harmonize and bridge seven national cohort datasets, including Add Health, PSID, REGARDS and HRS, into a synthetic, nationally representative cohort that tracks chronic disease from age 30.
Rahma Mungia
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Describe how community dentists in the South Texas Oral Health Network adjust oral appliance therapy for obstructive sleep apnea, documenting their protocols at delivery, initial and final adjustment visits for 60 patients.
Robert Crosnoe
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Document whether exposure to family member deaths in childhood and adolescence predicts unstable trajectories of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and health in young adulthood, using longitudinal causal-inference techniques on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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