Dr. Mario Garrett, The History of Race

Mario Dominic Garrett, Ph.D., is a professor of gerontology at San Diego State University, California, USA. Professor Garrett obtained his BSc with a First Class Honors/summa cum laude,  from the University of East London and his Ph.D. from the University of Bath with an empirical thesis on loneliness. As the team leader of a United Nations Population Fund project, he coordinated a five-year project looking at support systems for older adults in the People’s Republic of China. While with the United Nations Institute on Ageing, Garrett founded the international aging magazine ‘BOLD’  (now International Journal on Ageing in Developing Countries). Later with the Minority Aging Research Institute at the University of North Texas, Garrett was responsible for coordinating a statewide study in all the nineteen pueblos in New Mexico. He has also designed and implemented gerontology courses in Pueblos and Reservations in the State of New Mexico as the Director of an educational program with the Center on Aging, University of New Mexico. After joining the faculty at San Diego State University in 2004, he was the chairman of the department of gerontology and directed three research institutes. Garrett has published six books, over 30 refereed papers, and some 200 blogs and editorials. He has just published Coming of Age in Film with Cambridge Scholar Publishing and is currently working on Social Dementia: The role of memory. 

July 31st 2020 : "We all have a life-time guarantee"

This presentation will introduce the history of race. How our earlier racist views biased categorization of people from different regions. There are no races, only the human race. In older age, we see how people of different ethnicities have different health outcomes. Although we all have a life-time guarantee, for some this is 7 years shorter than for others. The evidence for these outcomes points more toward social conditions rather than biological differences. The era of biological determinism is dead. Ecological and social factors influence our health more than we assumed in the past. Those that live long and healthy appreciate these factors we need to ensure that others similarly benefit from this knowledge.