Impact
Stephanie Studenski is a geriatrician and clinical researcher, now Professor Emerita of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work centres on physical function, mobility and their prognostic value in older adults. She led the widely cited 2011 JAMA pooled analysis of nine cohort studies covering 34,485 community-dwelling adults aged 65 or older, which related usual gait speed to survival and showed that this simple physical performance measure can help individualise life-expectancy estimates beyond age and sex. This work helped establish gait speed as a practical clinical vital sign of aging and a functional outcome relevant to trials of interventions targeting aging. She remains publishing in 2025-2026, including studies with Pittsburgh colleagues on nigrostriatal dopaminergic function, resilience to systemic risk factors and skeletal muscle energy metabolism in older adults, and serves as an Associate Editor for JAMA Network Open. For longevity readers she represents the clinical-gerontology side of the field: measuring functional aging in people and linking it to survival and healthspan outcomes.
Metrics
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Research funding
44 NIH awards · USD 17M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Pittsburgh Older Americans Independence Center National Institute on Aging · 2006 · USD 2M
- Pittsburgh Older Americans Independence Center National Institute on Aging · 2005 · USD 2M
- Pittsburgh Older Americans Independence Center National Institute on Aging · 2007 · USD 2M
- Pittsburgh Older Americans Independence Center National Institute on Aging · 2008 · USD 1M
- Pittsburgh Older Americans Independence Center National Institute on Aging · 2004 · USD 1M