Athens, Ga. – University of Georgia kinesiology professor Elaine Cress has received the 2008 Herbert H. deVries Award for Distinguished Research in the field of aging and gerontology from the American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation.
Cress, a professor of exercise science and director of UGA’s Aging and Physical Performance Laboratory in the College of Education’s department of kinesiology, has received more than $8 million in research funding, and has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on more than 25 studies during her more than three decades in the field of gerontology.
Cress also serves as a faculty member in UGA’s Institute of Gerontology, based in the College of Public Health, where she works to provide a way to quantify the concept of physical reserve as it relates to functional ability and physical capacity. Cress has recently turned her attention to understanding the interaction between a person’s functional ability, physical reserve and quality of life in different living environments.
Her research is internationally respected, and she has active research programs in Switzerland and in Italy. The Continuous Scale Physical Functional Performance measure, a system she designed while at the University of Washington at Seattle, is used in several European countries as well as Canada and the United States. Cress has published 40 peer-reviewed articles and six book chapters with over 2,500 citations of her work.
In addition to her scholarly pursuits, she served on a special emphasis review panel for the National Institute on Aging and is a past associate editor for the Journal of Physical Activity and Aging. She also has served on the UGA Institutional Review Board, the College of Education graduate faculty committee and the Athens Community Council on Aging board.
Cress joined the UGA faculty in 1998 from UW, where she was a Fellow in the division of geriatrics senior research from 1989-93. She was named a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine in 1996, and received the longstanding service award from the Northwest Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine in 1999.
She received her Ph.D. in kinesiology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
