Laura L. Carstensen

Laura L. Carstensen is professor of psychology and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy at Stanford University, where she is also the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, which explores innovative ways to solve the problems of people over 50 and improve the well-being of people of all ages. She is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging for more than 20 years and is currently funded through a MERIT award.

Dr.Carstensen is a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Gerontological Society of America. She has chaired two studies for the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in The Aging Mind and When I’m 64.

She has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America. She is currently a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on an Aging Society. In 2011, she published A Long Bright Future: Happiness, Health and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity (Public  Affairs Press).
 
Carstensen received her B.S. from the University of Rochester and Ph.D in clinical psychology from West Virginia University.

Five years ago, Carstensen and her colleagues founded the Stanford Center on Longevity, an exciting and innovative effort that involves over 100 faculty members from all over campus – medicine, law, business, computer science, psychology, engineering, economics.  The Center builds interdisciplinary teams of researchers and forms partnerships with businesses and industries outside of the university in order to discover and implement practical solutions for problems of people over 50 that improve quality of life at all ages.

The National Building Museum provides biographies of speakers, program participants, and exhibition subjects. Learn more about our programs and lectures.