The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) has awarded the 2026 Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Article Award to Xi Chen, PhD, associate professor of public health (health policy) at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), and Zhuoer Lin, a PhD alumnus of YSPH who is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The honor recognizes “insightful and innovative publications on aging and life course development in the behavioral and social sciences” and is named after social psychologist Richard Kalish.
Chen and Lin earned the Kalish Award for their article, Exposure to School Racial Segregation and Late-Life Cognitive Outcomes. The study appeared in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open. In addition to Chen and Lin, who led the study, co-authors include Thomas Gill, MD, of Yale School of Medicine, and Yi Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral associate at YSPH.
The study reports on ways in which racial segregation in schools may influence the development of dementia in later life. To explore the effects of segregation on cognition, Chen and his team analyzed the historical school records of more than 20,000 study participants. This allowed them to capture an objective measure of the impacts of segregation, rather than relying on participants’ self-reports.
They found that Black individuals who were exposed to segregation during their school years had lower cognitive ability and a higher prevalence of dementia in later life, after accounting for other variables. One of the ways that segregated education impacts cognitive ability is by influencing educational quality and inequities, and future health conditions and unhealthy behaviors, such as increasing the chances of diabetes or addiction to smoking, Chen said.
The study is believed to be the first to use nationwide data to examine the relationship between school segregation and cognitive outcomes in later life. In future work, Chen and his research team hope to leverage more educational quality measures to elucidate the mechanisms linking segregation to cognition, as well as collaborate with neuroscientists to explore early brain structure or function that links segregation to cognitive aging.
The award presentation will take place at GSA’s 2026 annual scientific meeting in November.