The University of Minnesota Gopher Prevention Squad (GPS) won the Sloboda/Bukowski Cup at the Society for Prevention Research (SPR) annual meeting in May!

Each year, SPR sponsors a friendly competition among teams of early career researchers. Each team works with the same data set for two months prior to the meeting, and then presents their research project at an invited symposium at SPR. Each team has only 10 minutes to present! A panel of senior prevention scientist judges and the audience rate the quality of the research and the presentations. The highest scoring team wins!

GPS consisted of graduate students from the Department of Family Social Science, Laurel Davis, Jen Doty, Diego Garcia-Huidobro, Jessie Rudi; and epidemiology graduate student Dylan Galos. The team’s mentor Dr. J Michael Oakes is an associate professor in the Division of Epidemiology & Community Health.

This year, the teams were granted access to the World Health Organization Study on Global Aging and Adult Health (SAGE). The winning presentation was titled, “Depression in Communities: Simulating a Randomized Trial”. The team compared communities with a high prevalence of depression to communities with a low prevalence of depression on prevalence of frailty and quality of life. They found that decreasing the prevalence of depression in communities has the potential to reduce frailty and increase the quality of life among older adults.

Congratulations!