Healthy Aging (DSP GA)

Abstract

The Doctorate College „Healthy Aging“ (DK_GA) focuses on research dedicated to ‚Aging and Age‘ thereby covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
Aging and demographic change are increasingly pertinent topics, that directly concern large if not all parts of today’s western societies. In this context of actual increasing life expectancies in combination with decreasing birth rates are of major relevance: today 1.6 million aged 65+ live in Austria. By 2030 this number will increase to over 2.2 million. Clearly our society ages! The major goal is to enable aging in good health. How physical, psychological and mental conditions at or above retirement age can be remained at optimum both in females and males is a vexed question, suffice it to say that to date the aging society is considered a major socioeconomic and political challenge.
The prime aim of the DK_GA is to train doctoral students to gain scientific competences together with specific skills that will distinguish them to fill decision-making positions engaged in developing future innovations specifically tackling issues regarding the vastly advancing demographic change. Their work should be firstly based on scientific knowledge and insights, and they should be able reacting through concerted actions and in a cooperative fashion.
We believe that the highly transdisciplinary topic of healthy aging can only be sufficiently covered when addressing questions synergistically by means of interdisciplinary research furnished by the wide range of expertise, which are actually already provided now by our university. Appropriate solutions do exist, in particular how common age-associated deficits can be relieved with the aid of technical innovations. Technology accomplishing successful aging only comprises optimal outcomes when being calibrated by social, psychological and individual input. It is thus generally believed in gerontology that expertise of social and human sciences together with jurisprudence accompanied with up-to-date communication strategies will yield feasible broadly accepted solutions for target groups.

The DK_GA team (faculty+students) is convinced that sustainable solutions addressing the vastly changing societal needs in the context of the demographic change cannot be provided and translated by highly educated specialists trained in a single discipline. They need to be effectively connected, forming teams which act in an interdisciplinary fashion. Hence, the DK-HA has moulded a transdisciplinary team which configures experts groups to support expert training and specific research in distinct disciplines in conjunction with synergistic multidisciplinary structures destined to exchange knowledge and create viable solutions to bring forth successful aging for our society.