HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDIES
AROUND THE WORLD

Call for Papers: Emerging Challenges in Long-Term Care and Caregiving October 2, 2026 — Cambridge, MA
The NBER Center for Aging and Health Research is planning a conference on emerging challenges in long-term care and caregiving. The conference, which is made possible with support from the National Institute of Aging, will be organized by Brian McGarry (University of Rochester and NBER) and Corina Mommaerts (University of Wisconsin, Madison and NBER). It will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday, October 2, 2026. Kate McEvoy, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, will deliver keynote remarks.

The meeting will focus on several factors, including Medicaid and Medicare policy, household characteristics that affect care utilization, the ways in which different diseases affect caregiving needs, labor market policy, and immigration policy.

The organizers welcome submissions on any subject related to long-term care and informal caregiving. Submissions that use novel data sources are of particular interest. They hope to include perspectives from economics as well as other disciplines such as sociology, public health, and medicine. All researchers, including those who are not NBER affiliates and who are early in their careers, are welcome to submit papers. Topics of particular interest include:

• Innovative models for supporting informal caregivers
• Alternatives to nursing home care, including assisted living facilities or home- and community-based services
• Expanded Medicaid funding for home- and community-based services
• Approaches to improving the quality and reducing the cost of formal care, including innovative payment models
• Long-term care insurance
• Unique challenges faced by patients living with dementia and their families
• Cross-national differences in approaches to long-term care
• Novel data, including the measurement of informal care and administrative linkages

To be considered for presentation, papers or extended abstracts must be submitted via the following link by 11:59pm ET on Friday, June 31, 2026: https://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=LTCf26

Authors chosen to present papers will be notified by early August, 2026.

The NBER will cover hotel and economy-class travel for up to two authors of each paper that is selected for presentation.

Please share this call with others who may be interested in submitting a paper. Logistical questions about this meeting should be directed to confer@nber.org; other questions about the meeting content should be directed to Sarah Holmes Berk at sholmes@nber.org.

Harmonization Recommendations from the Gateway to Global Aging Data
Many of our network and NIA collaborators were recently included in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. You can view their published work via the link below:

Volume 81, Issue Supplement_1, February 2026
Harmonization Recommendations from the Gateway to Global Aging Data
https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/issue/81/Supplement_1

Call for Applications, Education Hackathon
As a part of the Gateway to Global Aging Data’s ongoing effort to investigate education’s long-term implications for late-life health, the Gateway education team is hosting a research hackathon for early-career researchers from July 27-30 in Washington, D.C. The hackathon is a team-based competition where participants will collaborate on a study investigating the role of education in determining risk, resilience, and disparities in non-communicable diseases, with a special interest in cognition. Winners will receive financial support for attending future conferences to present the work and journal article submission or publication costs. 

Interested applicants must submit an individual research proposal and a CV by Friday, April 17, 2026. Proposals should be between 1-2 pages in length, excluding references.

Additional details and the call for applications are on our website. For questions about the hackathon and the application process, please contact hackathon@g2aging.org.

NIH Issues Request for Information on Draft Proposal Harmonizing Research Participant Data Policies
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requesting public input on its proposal to establish harmonized and transparent policy requirements for protecting human participant research data. Specifically, NIH proposes to:

1. 1. 1. Establish policy requirements for which data should be controlled-access under NIH data sharing policies, and
      2. Revise the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy to simplify and harmonize requirements.

The full proposal can be found here. Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback on the policy proposals as described in the request for information. Comments must be submitted electronically at https://osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form-draft-nih-controlled-access-data-policy-and-proposed-revisions-to-nih-genomic-data-sharing-policy/.

Responses will be accepted through March 4, 2026.

Additional Context regarding the Request for Information can be found at https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-26-023.html.

Questions may be sent to SciencePolicy@od.nih.gov

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