A key part of the Division of Geriatric Medicine’s mission and vision for the future with the expansion of its academic footprint is research. The division is actively recruiting a geriatrician with a track record of grant funding and actively funded to lead research in geriatrics at Penn State College of Medicine. Current faculty members are involved in multiple grant-funded and internally-funded research projects, serving in multiple roles from collaborators and mentors to co-principal investigators.
For example, Nicole Osevala, MD, interim division chief, led a multimillion-dollar Department of Human Services grant to address COVID-19 outbreaks in central Pennsylvania nursing homes.
The College of Medicine is also partnering with the Pennsylvania Department of Health on the Long-Term Care Resiliency, Infrastructure Supports, and Empowerment (LTC-RISE) grant-funded initiative, which aims to help long-term care facilities weather and overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The work promotes high-quality frontline long-term care staff education along with leadership training, infection control support and emergency management preparation. The RISE grant includes collaboration with the Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing’s Tressa Nese and Helen Diskevich Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence and the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University. Learn more about the Southcentral LTC-RISE team here.
The Department of Medicine provides opportunities to apply competitively for funding to advance innovation in geriatric clinical care and to collaborate with clinician-researchers in other divisions who do research that is relevant to aging.
Contact Us
To speak to someone about geriatric medicine research, please contact Nicole Osevala, MD.
Learn More About Endocrinology
During the one-year Geriatric Medicine Fellowship, our fellows complete a quality-improvement research project where they identify with a mentor a potential gap in care provided in the outpatient, long-term care or acute care setting. Together with their mentor, they develop a simple quality improvement proposal. They spend the first few months implementing an intervention and ascertaining its effectiveness with a goal of submitting/presenting a poster abstract at an annual meeting and submitting a brief report for publication. Our current fellows will present their projects at two national meetings: American Medical Directors Association-Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine (AMDA-PALTC) 23 and the American Geriatrics Society 2023 annual meeting.