Profiles

Dr. Catherine Sarkisian is a geriatrician and NIH-funded research scientist. Since early in her training she has committed her career to improving quality of life among vulnerable older adults. Most of her work has focused on implementing and evaluating academic-community partnered interventions and more recently, academic-health-system partnered pragmatic trials. These interventions include community-based, theory-grounded behavioral interventions to increase physical activity among minority older adults and health-system level programs to reduce low value and potentially harmful care. A common theme of Dr. Sarkisian's work is that health is not always achieved by providing more medical care; some older adults may do better by spending less time in the hospital/healthcare system and more time doing things that are personally meaningful. Her recent research has been published in high impact journals including New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and JAMA Internal Medicine.

With the support of an NIH/NIA Midcareer Award in Patient-Oriented Research (K24) and an R01 from NIA, Dr. Sarkisian focused her work increasingly on partnering with health systems to address the problem of overuse of low-value care (care that does not help patients and may harm them). Her research is by nature interdisciplinary and she has several leadership roles that capitalize on her skills at mentoring and working with diverse teams. She is primary mentor on 3 NIH K-awards and deeply committed to mentoring a diverse range of trainees. She is Director of the Community Liaison Core of the NIH/NIA-funded UCLA Resource Center for Minority Aging Research/Center for Health Improvement of Minority Elders (RCMAR/CHIME) and the Co-Director of the UCLA CTSI Special Populations Program. She serves as Co-Director of Stakeholder Engagement for the U.S. Deprescribing Research Network (USDeN), which is a natural extension of her work with health systems and communities. In 2018, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA launched a new “UCLA Value-Based Care Research Consortium” (VBCRC) with her leadership.