Jeffrey Stokes

Department Head, Allied Health Sciences

Jeffrey Stokes, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Department Head of the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston College in 2017, and joined UConn in 2026, following nearly a decade at the University of Massachusetts Boston Department of Gerontology. An interdisciplinary social and behavioral scientist specializing in aging, families, and health, Dr. Stokes has published more than 75 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Aging and Health, and the Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Social Sciences. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed academic journal Research on Aging, and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

His research program has received funding support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Donaghue Medical Research Foundation, among others, and focuses on the ramifications of intergenerational, marital, and social relationships for adults’ health and well-being in mid-to-later life. This includes analysis of dyadic associations between intimate partners’ mental, physical, and cognitive health in later life, as well as effects of neighborhood characteristics on adults’ well-being. He takes a biopsychosocial approach to studying health and has a particular interest in loneliness as a psychosocial mechanism linking social context, relationships, and structure to health and health disparities. Current research topics include: intimate partners’ loneliness as a risk factor for divorce/separation, widowhood, and mortality over time; recent cancer diagnosis and psychological resilience among older patients and their intimate partners; rural/urban disparities in loneliness and social isolation among the aging population; environmental and social determinants of cognitive decline and impairment; and experiences of discrimination and cardiovascular health among older couples.

He has held numerous leadership positions at UMass Boston as well as in academic organizations including the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). He is past Associate Editor at Personal Relationships and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. He also serves regularly on NIH grant review panels, and sits on the advisory council of The CT Collaborative to End Loneliness.