Dr. Zachary Zimmer has been named the 2022 winner of the university's Research Excellence Award. He was recognized during MSVU's spring convocation celebrations held May 19 and 20, 2022. The annual award recognizes contribution to the research community and to the research climate at MSVU. The award also serves to showcase the high level of scholarly research at the university.
Dr. Zimmer is a Professor in the Department of Family Studies and Gerontology, and Tier I Canada Research Chair and Director of the Global Aging and Community Initiative at MSVU.
Dr. Zimmer completed his PhD at the University of Michigan in the Department of Sociology with a specialization in social demography, health and aging, methods, and statistics. His dissertation titled "Educational Differentials in Functional Status of Older Adults in Three Asian Societies: Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines" was successfully defended in 1998. Dr. Zimmer also completed his MA in sociology at the University of Manitoba (his thesis explored "The Impact of Arms: A Study of Militarization in the Developing World" in 1989), and his BA in Sociology/Criminology at the University of Winnipeg in 1983.
Prior to joining MSVU, Dr. Zimmer was a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Science in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco from 2011 until June 2016. He joined MSVU in July 2016.
Dr. Zimmer's program of research includes three key areas:
- The long-term impacts of war and wartime trauma on health and aging,
- The demography of pain, and
- Religiosity and health.
Throughout his long and distinguished research career, Dr. Zimmer has been a highly productive and well-funded scholar with some 32 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as four book chapters in edited volumes and over $10 million in research funding for his research program. It is not surprising that Dr. Zimmer has more than 5,000 citations of this work, an h-index of 38, and an i10 index of 85.
Since joining MSVU, Dr. Zimmer has continued to build and expand on a variety of national and international research partnerships to advance understanding of war experiences and the long-term impacts of war, the demography of chronic pain, wartime trauma on mental health, pain and population health, the enduring effects of war on survivors in Vietnam, among other interconnected research areas.
Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition, Dr. Zimmer!
