Mary Tinetti, MD
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health Chief of the Division of Geriatrics

Mentee:

Leora Horwitz

Dr. Tinetti serves as Director of the Program on Aging and is the Director of the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. She is a leading expert in the area of falls and fall injury risk factor identification and prevention. She was one of the first investigators to identify that older persons at risk for falling and injury could be identified, that the risk factors putting them at risk could be determined and that multifactorial risk factor reduction strategies, targeted at modifiable risk factors, could be effective at reducing the rate of falling. This series of NIA funded studies were important not only because they dispelled the notion that falling was an inevitable and thus unpredictable and unpreventable accompaniment of aging, but also because they helped convince other investigators that many of the hitherto relatively neglected health problems of older persons, such as incontinence, delirium, and driving problems, could be addressed with rigorous scientific research methods. Dr. Tinetti’s body of work not only opened the field of geriatric clinical research but also brought credibility to the nascent field of geriatric clinical investigation, thus encouraging other talented investigators to embrace this field.