CARAH Project Manager, Sandy Schinfeld

Jefferson College of Health Professions mourns the tragic and sudden loss of Sandy Schinfeld, MPH, Project Manager at the Jefferson Center for Applied Research on Aging and Health (CARAH). She was killed in an automobile accident early Sunday morning, April 27, 2008.

Sandy began working at CARAH in July 1996 as a part-time interviewer. Over time, she took on other responsibilities including co-directing and overseeing the day-to-day research activities of the NIH REACH multi-site caregiver study (Environmental Skill-building) and the NIH Enhancing Function grant (Project ABLE). Sandy also mentored interviewing staff, helped with publications, organized CARAH’s annual dementia management conference, and developed the CARAH web page.

Sandy’s scholarly interests spanned family caregiving, adaptation to physical disability, and quality of life in older adults. She was a co-author with other CARAH researchers on numerous scientific publications and a presenter at many national gerontological conferences.

Sandy had a Master in Public Health (MPH) from Columbia University’s School of Public Health and in 2003 she entered Temple University’s Health Studies PhD program. She was completing her PhD thesis: “Unmitigated Communion and Depressive Symptoms in Spouses of Men with Prostate Cancer: The Role of Social Constraints and Self-Esteem.” She planned to continue to work at CARAH to advance the work on physical frailty (Project ABLE) and obtain funding for related research studies after receiving her PhD this coming October.

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