Plenary Session:
Invited Address by Laura L. Carstensen, PhD—

A Long, Bright Future: Aging in the 21st Century (3371)

Saturday, Aug. 8, 4:00–4:50 p.m., Room 717A

Laura L. Carstensen, PhD, is a member of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, where she is also founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr. Professor in Public Policy. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging for more than 20 years, and in 2005, she was honored with a MERIT award. Dr. Carstensen is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life span theory of motivation. With her students and colleagues, she has published over 100 articles on life span development. Her most current empirical research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing. Dr. Carstensen is a fellow in a number of professional organizations, including APA, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Gerontological Society of America. She serves on the Board of Science Advisors to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and has chaired two studies for the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in The Aging Mind and When I’m 64. She is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on an Aging Society. Dr. Carstensen has received numerous professional awards and honors, including the Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Research, the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America, as well as Stanford University’s Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and she has been selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. She received her BS from the University of Rochester and her PhD in clinical psychology from West Virginia University.

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