The School of Aging Studies welcomes Siyun Peng, PhD, as its newest assistant professor.
Peng is a gerontologist, sociologist, and applied statistician whose research focuses on the reciprocal relationship between social relationships and health across the life course. His expertise includes social networks, family, health, cognitive aging, ecological momentary assessment, and quantitative methods.
He is a co-investigator on five federally funded grants — four supported by the National Institute on Aging and one by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Four of the projects, funded through the R01 mechanism, examine social networks in populations including individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, older adults who have never married and live alone, and the role of social connectedness in complex diseases of aging through epigenetic pathways. His additional R01 project investigates social mechanisms driving cognitive health disparities among rural and urban older adults.
Before joining the School of Aging Studies, Peng was an assistant research scientist in the Department of Sociology and the Irsay Institute at Indiana University.