Uchechi A. Mitchell, PhD

Uchechi A. Mitchell is a National Institute on Aging (NIA) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, in the USC/UCLA Center for Biodemography and Population Health. She received her PhD in public health, with training in Community Health Sciences, from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2014.

She was a former predoctoral trainee with the NIA and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), where she pursued research on the effects of experiences of discrimination on health and health disparities. As a postdoctoral fellow, she is currently receiving training in gerontology and population aging, multidimensional aspects of the aging experience, and social determinants of change in biological risk among older adults.

Mitchell’s research investigates racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic inequities in health and aging. She examines the psychosocial and biological pathways leading to these systematic differences, with a specific emphasis on the role of social and psychosocial stressors. Current projects include research on social and age-related disparities in inflammation; racial disparities in cumulative biological risk and disease onset; differential exposure to discrimination as a determinant of racial disparities in biological risk; and educational differences in psychosocial well-being among older adults.

Mitchell's RCMAR project title was Economic Stress and Disease Risk: A Pathway to Health Inequalities Among Older Adults.