Researchers know that African-Americans get sicker and die earlier than white people—and now, a University of Michigan researcher will study whether racial segregation plays a part by changing a person’s genes.¶¶Margaret Hicken, director of the U-M Racism Lab at the Institute for Social Research, has won a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to examine inequalities in healthy aging between black and white people in the United States. The grant is a continuation of the Americans’ Changing Lives study, which has followed the same group of people in neighborhoods across the country for more than 30 years.