Session Description: Join us for the second of several 2022 sessions of the MIT AgeLab’s ongoing Aging & Equity series, a speaker series on the intersection of age, race, and ethnicity in longevity planning. In this virtual session held on Zoom, Dr. Uchechi Mitchell will present about "The Aging of the Black Community: A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Stress and Resilience." Historical and contemporaneous forms of racism have put Black older adults at greater risk for poor health and socioeconomic disadvantage. Despite these adversities, Black older adults have been shown to have similar if not better mental health than their White counterparts on certain indicators. The unique psychosocial resources that Black people use to cope with the stress of racism may help explain this "paradox".

About the Speaker: Dr. Uchechi A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health in the Division of Community Health Sciences. She is a health disparities and minority aging researcher who addresses questions at the intersection of population and biopsychosocial sciences. Much of her research uses data from national surveys of older adults to investigate pathways leading to racial/ethnic disparities in psychosocial outcomes, biomarkers, and supportive resources in late life. A central theme throughout her research is an interest in the ways in which individual and community-level stressors and coping processes shape health over the life course and contribute to our understanding of risk and resilience.