Kenneth M. Langa is an American physician and social scientist known for his work on aging, cognitive decline, and dementia. He is the A. Regula Herzog Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Survey Research at the University of Michigan and an investigator in longitudinal studies of health and retirement in aging populations.
In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Langa grew up in New Jersey and completed his undergraduate education at Amherst College, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in sociology in 1985. During this time, he was a visiting undergraduate at Harvard University. He pursued clinical and academic training at the University of Chicago as a Fellow in the Pew Program for Medicine, Arts and the Social Sciences, earning a PhD in Public Policy in 1992 and an MD in 1994.
During his MDâÂÂPhD training, Langa studied the impact of US cost-containment policies on the healthcare provided to those in poverty, publishing his first research article on this topic in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993.
In 1994, he moved to the University of Michigan for an internal medicine residency and later completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. In 1997, he reconnected with Robert J. Willis, his dissertation advisor at the University of Chicago, who had moved to the University of Michigan to become the principal investigator of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS).
Langa joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1999 and progressed from assistant professor to tenured professor. He currently holds joint appointments in the Medical School and the Institute for Social Research, and serves as co-director of the Health and Retirement Study, and co-director of the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) international network.
Langa has been a visiting professor at institutions including the University of Cambridge, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and the University of Otago in Dunedin.
His work combines population science with clinical insight to inform policies and interventions aimed at improving the health and well-being of older adults. Much of his research is conducted through and alongside the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the longitudinal study of U.S. adults and its international partner studies.
Langa has made researches to the HRS model of population studies, which are currently more than thirty-five countries that field surveys modeled on the HRS and Langa is a co-investigator or consultant to many of those studies. Langa's work is cited as part of US public policy deliberations, including a 2023 NY Times series on the need for major reforms of the US long-term care system.
A focus of Langa's work is measurement of cognitive function and dementia in population studies, including development and implementation of the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP), which harmonizes in-depth cognitive assessments across different countries to allow valid cross-national comparisons.
In 2024, Langa was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
He was also named the A. Regula Herzog Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Survey Research by the University of Michigan Board of Regents in 2025.
Langa is also an elected member of both the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).