Center on Aging Affiliated Faculty:

Faculty Profiles

Kathryn L. Braun, DrPH, is Director of the University of Hawaii Center on Aging and Professor of Public Health.  Her research focuses on Asian and Pacific Island aging, with publications exploring ethnic differences in life expectancy and mortality as well as cultural variations in disease perceptions and health practices.  She is author of the study and faculty guides associated with the telecourse, Growing Old in a New Age, and lead editor of the book, Cultural Issues in End-of-Life Decision Making.  She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, and received a Board of Regent's Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Hawaii in 1998.

Abe Arkoff, Ph.D. is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where he continues to teach in its Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He is a board certified (ABPP), licensed (Hawaii) clinical psychologist. At one time, Abe taught the oldest and the youngest students on campus—those in the Elderhostel program which he brought to the campus and coordinated and those in the Freshman Seminar Program that he created and directed. Abe has won the Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching, and he has been the University of Hawaii’s nominee for the national CASE Professor-of-the-Year Award. He created The Illuminated Life® workshop program that was winner of the 2004 American Society on Aging-MetLife “Mind Alert” award for innovative older adult learning. For ten years he was a volunteer working with terminally-ill patients and their families.

Patricia Lanoie Blanchette, MD, MPH, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geriatric Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is director the Pacific Islands Geriatric Education Center and the John A. Hartford Foundation Center of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine. She is board certified in internal medicine and geriatric medicine. She has won numerous awards and honors, including an Excellence in Teaching Award, Distinguished Alumnus of Leeward Community College and the University of Hawaii, Best Doctors in America, and the Soroptimist's Women of Distinction Award.

Colette V. Browne, DrPH, MSW, MEd, is Associate Professor and Chair of the gerontology concentration in the School of Social Work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Browne is the author of Women, Feminism and Aging, published by Springer Publishing Company in New York, and, together with Roberta Onzuka Anderson, co-author and editor of Our Aging Parents: A Guide to Eldercare, published by the University of Hawai'i Press. Dr. Browne's work reflects her interests in ethnogerontology, feminist thought, social gerontology, and gerontology curricula development.  She has been appointed to the State's Policy Advisory Board for Elderly Affairs by three governors, and presently serves as its Vice Chair.  She is the 1995 recipient of the Board of Regent's Excellence in Teaching Award, and was appointed by President Clinton to serve as one of the nation's 100 delegates to the National Symposium on Retirement held in Washington D.C. in 1998.

Michael Cheang, DrPH, is an instructor with the Department of family and Consumer Sciences, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, teaches the Old Age course in the life span series. He also teaches courses in Family Resource Management, Group Process and Leadership Skills, Family Policy, and supervises students doing internships. Until recently, Dr. Cheang once worked at the Center on Aging where he developed a curriculum for and trained paraprofessionals who work in elder care on the Big Island and Maui. He can be reached at cheang@hawaii.edu.

Dana Davidson, PhD, is Professor of Human Resources at the University of Hawaii. Her areas of interest include intergenerational interaction, health, and program evaluation. She is the 1992 recipient of the Board of Regents  Excellence in Teaching Award.  She is co-editor of the journal Human Communication, is the author of numerous articles and books on cross-cultural child development, and has been involved in setting up student exchanges between Hawaii and Finland.

Joan P. Dubanoski, MPH, PhD, is Project Director of an NIMH - funded longitudinal study on culture, personality, and health. From 1988 through 1994, she was Associate Specialist of the U.H. Center on Aging, where, in addition to teaching, research, and community service activities, she served as senior producer/co-writer of the telecourse/PBS series Growing Old in a New Age. The telecourse received one local and six national awards for excellence. She also worked with Abe Arkoff to adapt The Illuminated Life^® for the World Wide Web. She continues to work with faculty and community experts in gerontology, and is committed to providing information and education on aging through emerging technology.

Rebecca J. Goodman, MS, is Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. From 1991-1994, she was Project Coordinator/Associate Producer of the U.H. Center on Aging's award-winning telecourse/PBS series Growing Old in a New Age. Working with a team of community elders and retired professors in 1996, she developed the Academy for Lifelong Learning, an elderlearning program serving more than 1,000 older adults in Honolulu. In 2003, the lifelong learning program obtained grant support from The Bernard Osher Foundation of San Francisco and became the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). In 2004, OLLI-UHM and its featured workshop, The Illuminated Life, developed by UHM Professor Emeritus Abe Arkoff, were selected by the American Society on Aging and the MetLife Foundation to receive the MindAlert Award for innovative older adult learning program.

Cullen T. Hayashida, PhD, is a graduate affiliate faculty with the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. He is the current President of Assisted Living Options Hawaii, a non-profit professional association and a Director on the Hawaii State Board of Medical Examiners. He has been involved with long-term care service development since 1979 and today is the Director of Elderly Care Development, Hawaii Health Systems Corporation-Oahu Region. Since 1979, he was involved with the development of over 20 new long-term care projects that are all aimed to finding more cost-effective solutions to long-term care service delivery. Areas of study have included research and development work in assisted living, affordable supportive senior housing, residential care homes, adult day care services, county-based long-term care indicators, comparative systems of long-term care with particular attention to Japanese society, quality of nursing home care.

Anthony Lenzer, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Public Health, and former Director, Center on Aging, University of Hawaii. At the University, he also served as Executive Producer, writer, and interviewer for the Center's award-winning PBS series, Growing Old in a New Age. Although retired, Dr. Lenzer continues to be involved in the field of aging. He periodically teaches a graduate gerontology course at UH; lectures to lay and professional audiences; and is an active volunteer with AARP Hawaii, Kokua Council, and the Hawaii Pacific Gerontological Society.

Nancy D. Lewis, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Geography and the Center for Pacific Island Studies, and is Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii.  She specializes in medical geography and her research focuses on gender, aging, and health, primarily in the Pacific.  She is active in several globally focused boards, serving as Secretary General for the Pacific Science Association 1999-2003 and as board member of the International Geographical Union Commission on Health and Development 1996-2000.

Charon A. Pierson, RN, GNP, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geriatrics at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii. She has been in clinical practice as a gerontological nurse practitioner since 1984 and has been in academics since 1978. As part of her doctoral work in medical sociology, she researched and published on issues related to end-of-life decision making. Her other academic interests include ethnomethodology and conversation analysis within the context of multidisciplinary collaborative hospital rounds and access to services for elderly in Hawaii. She is active in many professional nursing organizations and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and the founding editor of Nurse Practitioner Forum. She was a John A. Hartford Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of California at San Francisco from 2001-2003.

James H. Pietsch, JD, is Director of the University of Hawaii's Elder Law Program, Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. He received his BA from Georgetown University and his JD from the Catholic University of America. He is a member of the Iowa state Bar, the Hawaii State Bar and Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Within the community, he has served on several committees focusing on aging, ethics and health care, including the Governor's Blue Ribbon Committee on Living and Dying With Dignity, the Governor's Elder Abuse Committee. He us also a member of several Hospital Ethics Committees on Oahu. In 1990, he was the recipient of the fifth annual Paul Lichterman Memorial Award for contributions to the advancement of law and aging. In 2003 he was the Hung Wo and Elizabeth Lau Ching Foundation Award for Community Service Recipient at the University of Hawaii.

S.I. Shapiro, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology at the University and an affiliate member of the Center on Aging. Together with hospice personnel, he has been teaching a series of courses on death and dying with an emphasis on lessons from the dying. He also teaches a variety of courses in consciousness and the arts, the psychology of knowledge and wisdom, classical Asian psychologies of the mind, and transpersonal studies. He was Executive Editor of the International Journal of Tranpersonal Studies and the found and co-editor of its subseries, Voices of Russian Transpersonalism. He has one hundred publications, including three books.

Eldon L. Wegner, PhD, is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. He received an Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Social Sciences in 1991 and was the recipient of the 2000 Na Lima Kokua Ma Waena O Makua Award for Outstanding Research/Training from the Hawaii Pacific Gerontological Society. His areas of research and teaching are medical sociology, social psychology, and social gerontology, with a special focus on issues of long-term care for the elderly, including family caregiving, adaptation and coping with chronic illness, the effectiveness of home health services, and financing of long-term care. His recent projects include cross-national studies of public and private roles in care for the elderly, including implementation of national long-term care insurance in Germany and Japan. He is Co-PI on a project to develop benchmarks as indicators of the long-term care service adequacy for the counties of Hawaii. In addition, he is currently an investigator with the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence among Asian and Pacific Islander Youth, and is a faculty mentor with the Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research Development Program (NHMHRDP) of the Department of Psychiatry, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii at Manoa, which focuses on cultural risk factors for mental and behavioral problems and developing models of culturally appropriate interventions

Barbara W.K. Yee (AKA Bobbie), PhD, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, she has been interested in how middle aged and elderly Southeast Asian refugees adapt to the loss of homeland and culture. Her current research examines how acculturation influences health beliefs and lifestyle practices across three generations of Vietnamese adults living in the U.S.. Dr. Yee is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Gerontological Society of America. She currently serves on the Expert Panel of Minority Women’s Health, PHS, and on the steering committee for the Bright Futures for Women’s Health and Wellness, HRSA, DHHS. Dr. Yee was awarded the Okura Community Leadership Award from the Asian American Psychological Association, from the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation, for outstanding community leadership that benefits the Asian American community.

Emese Somogyi-Zalud, MD, is Associate Professor at the Department of Geriatric Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine. She holds certifications in internal, geriatric, and palliative medicine. Her primary focus is palliative and end of life care. Her scope of activities includes education, patient care, research, and community service. She is involved with several initiatives aimed at improving the care of those with serious and terminal illness in Hawaii.