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Leonard Davis School Ph. D. Candidate Receives Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania

When Dawn Alley was a young girl in Battle Ground, Indiana, a town with only two stoplights outside of nearby West Lafayette, she was bored in school. Classes were too easy for the eleven-year old wunderkind.  After school, she would go to the nearby county nursing home where her grandmother was the manager, and spend time with the residents, who were mostly low-income.  There she participated in group activities and, most importantly, got to know the people.  The experience instilled a sense of respect for her elders and was a portent of things to come. 

Fixing the problem of not being challenged in school proved to be easy.  She skipped sixth grade.  That put her at USC’s freshman orientation, a Presidential Scholarship recipient, at a mere 16 years old.  It never fazed her. 

“I got used to being the last one of all my friends to do everything,” she said. 

That’s because throughout her meteoric rise through the academic universe she’s been light years ahead of kids her own age.  This spring, she completed her Ph. D. from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.  While other 24 year-olds are entering grad school or beginning their first job out of college, Alley has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania.

The name of the school she’ll be working at on the U-Penn campus?  None other than the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, where she will be continuing her research on health disparities of people from a variety of socio-economic and racial backgrounds. 

“I’m excited because the fellowship is a continuation of USC’s multidisciplinary approach to the study of gerontology,” she said.

It was the variety of subjects offered within the Davis School’s interdisciplinary curriculum that attracted her in the first place. 

In her first two years of undergraduate studies, she thought she wanted to major in Public Policy while completing the prerequisites for medical school, but her first couple of classes at the USC Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center made her rethink her plans. 

“There’s so much more to health than just what happens in the doctor’s office,” she said.

It was the practicality of the material covered along with her experiences as a child that helped weigh her decision of what undergraduate degree to pursue.   One influential class was Gero 320: The Psychology of Aging, where she worked on a project examining public transportation problems for elderly people with cognitive problems.  Then she took Gero 416, Professors Eileen Crimmins and Caleb Finch’s class on Health Issues in Aging.

“They dealt with these exciting scientific questions that have actual relevance in people’s lives,” Alley said.

A required internship helped reaffirm that she had made the right decision.  She volunteered at an assisted living facility and found that its residents had become invisible -- alive, yet removed from society. 

“They had pictures of who they were in the past.  One was a teacher.  Another showed a woman with her husband in the war.  These people are important,” she said.  “Their problems are important.”

She spent the last eight years trying to draw attention to the plight of seniors, a population group growing exponentially throughout the United States and whose problems will never just “disappear.”  It is estimated that by the year 2050, the number of Americans 65 years or older will be nearly 80 million. 

Working together with Eileen Crimmins, Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and Sociology, she is currently working on a study of gender differences in hypertension.  Throughout the 1990s, there was an increase in undiagnosed hypertension in women while at the same time there was a rise in the efficacy of hypertension medication for men. Their findings will be published this fall.

“Dawn Alley has been one of the stars in our Gerontology Ph.D. program,” said Dr. Crimmins.  “She has taken advantage of our multidisciplinary faculty to work in a number of areas related to aging.  She has shown both incredible depth and breadth in the work she has done while at USC.” 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellowship is a two-year program.  She is one of only 18 students nationwide at six schools to have been accepted.  She looks forward to being closer to family in Philadelphia and to the changing of the seasons that reminds her of her childhood. 

Reminiscing, she recalled the girl in the picture of the USC recruiting pamphlet she received when she was in high school: an accomplished graduate, with a bright smile filled with optimism for the future.  “I wanted to be just like her,” she said.  

She has been “that girl” for quite some time now.

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“I’m excited because the fellowship is a continuation of USC’s multidisciplinary approach to the study of gerontology.”

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