AFAR is pleased to announce the recipient of our 2025 Terrie Fox Wetle Rising Star Award in Health Services and Aging Research, Lauren Hunt, PhD, RN, FNP.
One of AFAR’s four annual Scientific Awards of Distinction, this award honors a health services researcher in an early or middle phase of their career who has already made important contributions with work that respects the value of multidisciplinary health services science and that is likely to be highly influential in shaping practice and research for decades to come. Named after former AFAR board president and current board member Terrie Fox Wetle, PhD, who has devoted her career to improving the lives of older people, the award is a framed citation and carries a cash prize of $5,000.
Lauren Hunt, PhD, RN, FNP, is an Associate Professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). A PhD-trained nurse practitioner and health services investigator, Dr. Hunt’s research focuses on understanding the geriatric palliative care needs and experiences of older adults with dementia across care settings. Her vision is to help older adults, particularly those with dementia, to live and die as comfortably and peacefully as possible. With methodological interest in using Medicare claims and other “big data”, her research has focused on three main areas: 1) Hospice and palliative care health service use and quality of care in older adults with dementia and other serious illnesses; 2) Identifying geriatric palliative care needs in vulnerable older adults across settings; 3) Potentially burdensome interventions and transitions in vulnerable older adults. Respected for her collaborations with health services researchers, physicians, nurses, social workers, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and gerontologists, she has first- or senior-authored more than 20 publications in Health Affairs, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and JAMA Internal Medicine. She has earned best abstract and manuscript awards from the American Geriatrics Society, and her novel and influential research on the Medicare hospice benefit program has been cited in Government Accountability Office investigative reports. She was named an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and has received the K76 Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award from the National Institute of Aging and the Emerging Scholar Award from the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies/University of Michigan Institute for Health Policy and Innovation.
Dr. Hunt will receive the Wetle Award at a ceremony hosted by AFAR at the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Scientific Meeting in Boston, MA on Thursday, November 13th from 6:30 - 8:00 pm ET. She will present a lecture on her research.
Learn more about the Wetle Rising Star Award and past recipients here.
