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NIH grant 1K01AG101453-01: The changing landscape of work in the United States and stalling life expectancy improvements
Institute: {'code': 'AG', 'abbreviation': 'NIA', 'name': 'National Institute on Aging', 'admin_org_id': '12500002', 'admin_funding_url': ''}. PI: Leah R Abrams. Award: $122742.
Start: 2026-09-11T00:00:00.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Dr. Abrams’ career objective is to become a leading researcher on healthy aging and contribute impactful
evidence about the role of paid work on population health and mortality. The proposed 5-year project augments
Dr. Abrams’ prior experience with additional training in occupational epidemiology, data science, machine
learning, and research translation. To ensure Dr. Abrams’ professional development and transition to
independence, this K01 will support a set of complementary training activities, including formal coursework
(e.g., Epidemiology of Environmental & Occupational Health Regulations), customized independent studies
(e.g. Machine Learning for Population Health), participation in seminars (e.g., IPUMS Big Microdata Network)
and workshops (e.g. The Op-ed Project), as well as strong mentorship from a multidisciplinary team of experts.
With this support, Dr. Abrams will leverage novel data linkages to fill a critical gap in evidence regarding how
changes to work in the U.S. have contributed to the mortality crisis. Life expectancy in the United States has
been stalled for over a decade, and while research has identified especially adverse mortality trends in
Americans with low educational attainment, the extent to which the changing landscape of work in the United
States has contributed to population patterns in mortality remains unclear. In Aim 1 of the proposed study, Dr.
Abrams will use decomposition analysis to determine the extent to which mortality trends in recent decades
have been shaped by (1) changing mortality rates within major occupation groups and employment statuses
and (2) changing distributions of occupations and employment across the population. In Aim 2, she will
evaluate how working conditions such as physical demands, sedentary work, exposure to hazards, irregular
hours, and stagnant wages explain various occupations’ cause-specific mortality risk, with a focus on causes of
death that have contributed to life expectancy stalls—such as drug overdoses, suicides, and cardiovascular
disease. In Aim 3, she will identify new occupation clusters based on health-relevant working conditions and
test their associations with mortality risk, laying a foundation for future work examining how these meaningful
occupation groups relate to disease incidence and progression, with special attention on subpopulation
heterogeneity.
By applying the latest demographic and data science methods to high-quality mortality data linked to
occupation-level working conditions, this project will generate timely and rigorous evidence on the role of work
in recent mortality trends in the United States. The findings may help guide individuals’ career decisions, while
identifying modifiable working conditions and technological changes that could serve as targets for
interventions to reduce mortality risk, thereby supporting the strength of the U.S. workforce and the health of
the aging population.document fetched 2026-09-20 02:42