USC Davis School of Gerontology professors Caleb Finch and Eileen Crimmins have been selected to receive Futures grants by the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

Intended to provide seed funding for interdisciplinary research on healthy life span and aging, the highly competitive awards were given to just 15 research initiatives across the country.

“We received many bold and innovative proposals and believe we have selected the most promising research projects to pursue,” said John W. Rowe, professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University and chair of the fifth annual Futures conference, where proposals were made last fall.

Established through a $40 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation in 2003, the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative is a 15-year effort to enhance communication among researchers, funding agencies, universities and the general public with the objective of stimulating interdisciplinary research at the most exciting frontiers.

According to the Keck Futures Web site, “major federal funding programs do not typically provide grants in areas that are considered risky or unusual.”

Futures grants allow researchers to recruit students and postdoctoral fellows, purchase equipment and acquire preliminary data, all of which can position the researchers to compete for larger awards from other public and private sources.

Awarded $75,000 for research that will examine healthy life spans in a number of population groups over time, Associate Dean and Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology Crimmins will gather information on the effects of changing physiological, social and behavioral characteristics.

“It’s important to recognize that this research is concerned with health span, the period of life that is free from serious or chronic illness,” Crimmins said. “Before this conference, researchers were focused primarily on life span.”

Finch, the ARCO & William F. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging, was selected as a collaborating researcher on two separate Keck Futures projects.

One utilizes robotic technology to aid physical and cognitive health. Autonomous, intelligent and companionable technology, known as socially assistive robotics, have the potential to positively impact the human health span.

Maja Mataric, associate dean for computer science research at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, will team with Finch on this study.

“We will develop and test systems that provide individualized physical and cognitive exercises for improving motivation and function in a socially engaging context,” Finch said.

Finch’s other study will use tissues from multiple species of animals to test hypotheses about biological factors that control life span and health span.

The National Academies and the W.M. Keck Foundation, according to the Keck Futures Web site, “believe considerable scientific progress and social benefit will be achieved by providing a counterbalance to the tendency to isolate research within academic fields.”