The Doctoral Program in Gerontology at UMB and UMBC which enrolled its first students in fall 2001 provides an interdisciplinary and integrative perspective on the process of human aging and the experiences of growing old.  Students concentrate in one of three tracks: epidemiology, policy, or social, cultural, and behavioral sciences. This is a research training program that acknowledges the complex, dynamic, and bi-directional relationship between individuals and the historical, political, economic, environmental, psychological, social, cultural and biological contexts in which aging occurs.

The goal of the program is to train a new generation of gerontology scholars conversant with interdisciplinary and integrative paradigms and research designs to examine the unique, reciprocal, and dynamic nature of aging in context.

UMB’s seven professional schools (dental, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, and social work) and UMBC's Erickson School and College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences departments (economics, emergency health services, public policy, psychology, and sociology & anthropology) combine to make this mission possible.

The program benefits from its close proximity to federal agencies located in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area such as the Social Security Administration, Administration on Aging, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), as well as numerous private and non-profit organizations dedicated to age-related programs and policy, research and service.