William Copeland
University of Vermont, VT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Death rates in middle age have risen in rural America, where economic opportunities and key infrastructure have declined. Yet aging is usually studied in people who are already middle-aged or older, assessed once a year or less.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
rural health
midlife mortality
aging
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Reassess at least 80% of Great Smoky Mountains Study participants in their early 40s with a 120-minute in-home visit covering socioeconomic status, attitudes, neurocognitive tasks and biomeasures such as blood pressure and blood spots.
- Track six months of everyday life in rural Appalachian adults using ecological momentary assessment surveys, actigraphy for activity and sleep, and GPS monitoring, linked to Census data and neighborhood observations.
- Recruit African American and non-African American adults aged 30–55 from North Carolina's rural Black Belt and collect the same in-home assessments, momentary surveys and GPS data used in Appalachia.
- Identify causal links between individual and community risk or resilience factors and midlife killers like suicide, alcohol abuse and cardiometabolic disease, using fixed-effect, structural equation, multilevel and instrumental-variable models.
- Harmonize measures with existing aging studies and share data through the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging, enabling rural–urban and regional comparisons of midlife health.
More about the research
These two projects build detailed data on how people live and age in rural North Carolina. The goal is to identify which personal and community factors raise health risks or protect against them at midlife. Both build on the Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS), a community-representative study that has repeatedly assessed the same participants across development.
Why it matters
Rising premature death in midlife is hitting rural communities hard. By pinpointing modifiable personal and community factors behind suicide, alcohol abuse and cardiometabolic disease, this work could guide prevention programs and public policy. It focuses on Native American, African American and White adults in Appalachia and the Black Belt. The shared datasets would also let researchers compare rural and urban health at midlife.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Kunstman
Auburn University, AL·Psychology
Test whether daily experiences of racial discrimination increase social pain minimization (having one's emotional pain dismissed) and sleep problems in Black American adults, using ecological momentary assessment and actigraphy.
Adam Roth
Oklahoma State University, OK·Social Science
Characterize the daily social interactions and activities of older adults in rural and urban areas, using surveys and ecological momentary assessments, which are brief repeated check-ins during everyday life.
Evan Jordan
Indiana University, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine where, when, and what environmental stressors are experienced by 300 urban and 300 rural Indiana residents with mild cognitive impairment, using the STRIVE smartphone app, GPS tracking, and smartwatch data.
The school
University of Vermont: 16 labs on PI Pages, $246M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
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