UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Timothy B. Gage, who received three advanced degrees at Penn State, is the 2016 recipient of the Graduate School Alumni Society Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is presented to alumni who have achieved exceptional success throughout the course of their career, and have demonstrated loyalty to the University and the Alumni Association. Gage was recognized for his accomplishments during the annual Graduate School Alumni Society Recognition Dinner on March 19.
Gage currently is professor of anthropology, epidemiology, and biostatistics, and associate director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Gage received a master’s degree in anthropology in 1974, master’s degree in ecology in 1979, and doctoral degree in anthropology in 1982. After receiving his doctorate, Gage was a postdoctoral scientist, and then assistant scientist, in the Genetics Department of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas, until 1986, when he accepted an appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at SUNY-Albany.
In 1989, Gage was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health at SUNY-Albany. He was promoted to associate professor in both departments in 1990, and to his current rank as a full professor in 1995. Gage continues to serve as an adjunct scientist with the Department of Genetics at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, formerly the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research.
Gage’s research has been supported by numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His research interests are the evolution of life histories including the international, historic, pre-historic, and inter-ethnic variability of human demographic rates and the causes of this variability. He is currently pursuing research in several specific areas:
- statistical modeling of infant mortality using population-based parametric mixtures of logistic regression;
- developing methods of demographic analysis applicable to endangered species, including the non-human primates; and
- pre-historic human demography.
Listed among the many awards that Gage has received are the 2008 Outstanding Researcher/Scholar Award presented by the Research Foundation of the State University of New York and the 2006 President’s Excellence in Research Award presented by the University at Albany, State University of New York.
In a joint nomination, two Penn State professors in the Department of Anthropology wrote, “…Gage is, without question, one of the foremost anthropological demographers of his generation, and is recognized internationally as one of the most important scholars in biological anthropology more generally…Gage’s work has been foundational for our understanding of the ecology and evolution of human mortality patterns over long stretches of history and prehistory…He is precisely the sort of scholar that Penn State strives to produce.”