J. Kevin Eckert is Professor of Sociology/Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Co-Director of the Doctoral Program in Gerontology; and Director of the Center for Aging Studies at The University of Maryland-UMBC. Additionally, he is a faculty affiliate with the Doctoral Program in Policy Sciences at UMBC and holds an adjunct appointment as Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at The University of Maryland, Baltimore. His research falls into several interrelated areas: home and community based care environments, caregiving, and quality of care/quality of life. In the past 10 years his work has focused on the situation of frail older adults residing in the community, specifically, small board and care homes and the developing phenomenon of assisted living. Other work has focused on the experiences of disabled adults of all ages participating in Cash and Counseling Demonstration and Evaluation, a three state study of consumer directed care. He is one of three originators (P. A. Sloane and S.I. Zimmerman) of the Collaborative Studies of Long Term Care (CSLTC), a multi-state series of complementary studies of Assisted Living involving an interdisciplinary team from UMBC, UMB and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The CS-LTC constitutes the first outcome study of RC/AL and the first to examine and compare the relationship of the structure and process of care to outcomes for this population summarized in the book Assisted Living: Needs, Practices and Policies in Residential Care for the Elderly. Zimmerman, S.I., Sloane, P., Eckert, J.K. (Eds.) (2001). Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Eckert is Principal Investigator of the CS-LTC study “Transitions from Assisted Living: Social and Cultural Aspects” (R01 AG-19345-01) a four year project examining the processes of change and decline among residents of six purposefully selected assisted living facilities in Maryland.

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