Jacquelyn B. James, PhD in psychology, is the chair of the Steering Committee, and principal investigator for: A Planning Grant to Assess the Viability of a Multidisciplinary Research Network, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is also co-director of the Boston College Center on Aging & Work, and research professor in the Lynch School of Education. Her research has focused on the meaning and experience of work, gender roles and stereotypes, adult development, and most recently, perceptions of older workers and emerging retirement issues. She and her colleagues have published numerous articles, opinion pieces, and four edited books. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, she and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, PhD, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Academic Affairs at Boston College, have conducted a major field experiment within a regional medical center to study the workplace impact of changes to “time & place management” policies and programs. Dr. James is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. She is also past president of the Society for the Study of Human Development and serves on the editorial board of its flagship journal, Research in Human Development.
Ruth Kanfer, PhD in psychology is a professor of psychology and founding director of the Center for the Study of Human Work in the 21st Century at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. Her areas of expertise include work motivation, job transitions, and the aging worker. She has published extensively on these and related topics and is co-editor of four books on motivation and emotions related to work and the age-diverse workforce. She has received APA’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Applied Psychology, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award and Williams R. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award. Her work has been supported by private organizations, foundations, and national agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Society for Human Resource Management. She has also served on the Academy of Management Board of Governors and as Division Chair of the Organizational Behavior Division, currently serves on the National Research Council’s Science and Practice of Learning Committee and has served on editorial boards of major journals in her field, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Management, and Work, Aging, and Retirement. Dr. Kanfer is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Sciences, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Christina Matz-Costa, PhD in social work, is an associate professor in the Boston College School of Social Work. Her research focuses broadly on understanding the changing needs and preferences of older adults and the extent to which programs, policy, and societal institutions are responding to these changes. Dr. Matz-Costa has received the John A. Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholars Award, a two-year grant to conduct an experience sampling/ecological momentary assessment study that uses iPad minis to collect intensive daily data from adults age 65 and older. Dr. Matz-Costa has co-authored 20 scholarly articles and book chapters and numerous reports/issues briefs, earned acceptance into the Early Career Work and Family Scholars Program (2013-2014) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA)-funded Institute on Aging and Social Work (2012-2014), and currently serves on the steering committee of the Greater-Boston Encore Action Network (G-Bean) and the advisory committee of the Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatric Social Work at Boston College.
Phyllis Moen, PhD in sociology, is the McKnight Presidential Chair in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She studies occupational careers, gender, families, and well-being over the life course, including the frequently obsolete social, cultural, and policy ecologies in which lives play out. She has published numerous books, such as Women’s Two Roles: a Contemporary Dilemma (1992); It’s about Time: Couples and Careers (2003); and The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Rowman & Littlefield 2005), with Patricia Roehling, which is based on scholarship funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as part of the Cornell Careers Institute at Cornell University. Professor Moen serves as a board member of Civic Ventures, a non-for profit organization that generates ideas and programs to reframe and redefine the second half of life and is part of the Conference Board’s Work-Life Leadership Council. She is currently the chair of the Aging and Life Course section of the American Sociological Association and has been elected as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, and the National Council of Family Relations.
Alicia H. Munnell, PhD in economics, is the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. She also serves as the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Before joining Boston College in 1997, Professor Munnell was a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1995-1997) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy (1993-1995). Previously, she spent 20 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (1973-1993), where she became Senior Vice President and Director of Research in 1984. She has published many articles, authored numerous books, and edited several volumes on tax policy, Social Security, public and private pensions, and productivity. Professor Munnell was co-founder and first President of the National Academy of Social Insurance and is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the Pension Research Council at Wharton. She is a member of the Board of The Century Foundation, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Pension Rights Center. In 2007, she was awarded the International INA Prize for Insurance Sciences by the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. In 2009, she received the Robert M. Ball Award for Outstanding Achievements in Social Insurance from the National Academy of Social Insurance. In 2015, she chaired the U.S. Social Security Advisory Board’s Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods. Alicia Munnell earned her B.A. from Wellesley College, an M.A. from Boston University, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, PhD in sociology and social work, is is a professor in the Boston College School of Social Work (BCSSW) and has appointments at the Boston College Carroll School of Management and the Business School at Middlesex University in London. Beginning in 2014, Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes became the Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Work at Boston College. In 2017, she became the School’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Academic Affairs. She is also founding director of the Center on Aging & Work and current co-president of the Work and Family Researchers Network. Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes speaks frequently at conferences and meetings and was most recently one of the invited plenary speakers at the 2015 Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) Annual Meeting. Her articles have been published in a number of scholarly and practitioner journals. She was a founding co-editor of the international journal, Community, Work & Family and co-edited a special issue of Generations (2007). Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes has co-edited a special issue of Work, Aging and Retirement that was published in 2016. Her publications include The Work-Family Handbook: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches to Research, published by Erlbaum Publishers (2006) which she edited with colleagues. She received her BA from Tufts University, MSP from Boston College, and PhD from Boston University.
Sara E. Rix, PhD in sociology, is currently, a consultant focusing on the economics of aging, particularly labor force trends, employment and retirement policy, and the challenges older workers face in remaining employed. In early 2015, she retired after 25 years as an employment expert on the Economics Team of AARP’s Public Policy Institute. Dr. Rix has written and spoken extensively on older workers, an aging society, and aging issues for some 40 years. She has been involved in numerous national and international activities dealing with the problems of, and prospects for, an aging world, including serving for many years as a lecturer in the Economic and Financial Aspects of Aging training program of the UN’s International Institute on Ageing in Malta. She is a member of the Post-Retirement Needs and Risks Committee of the Society of Actuaries and serves on the editorial or advisory boards of The Gerontologist, Public Policy and Aging Report, Journal of Retirement, Journal of Aging Policy, and Wider Opportunities for Women’s Elder Economic Security Initiative. While at AARP, she was a regular blogger for the Huffington Post on older workers and a co-convener of the Gerontological Society’s Older Workers and an Aging Workforce Interest Group. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Royal Society the Arts, and the Gerontological Society of America. Prior to coming to AARP, she was director of research at the Women’s Research and Education Institute. In her spare time, she volunteers as a primate interpreter and elephant behavior watcher at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
Ursula M. Staudinger, PhD in lifespan developmental psychology, is an internationally acknowledged aging researcher, and Vice President of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences. She joined the Mailman School in July 2013 as Founding Director of the new Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. The Center is a global hub for interdisciplinary aging research and knowledge transfer to policymakers, companies, as well as the general public. Additionally, Dr. Staudinger leads the renowned International Longevity Center (ILC) USA, part of the fourteen-member, multinational ILC – Global Alliance consortium that seeks to help societies address longevity and population aging in positive and productive ways. Prior to coming to Mailman, Dr. Staudinger was the Vice President of Jacobs University Bremen in Germany and Founding Dean of the Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development at Jacobs University Bremen, an interdisciplinary research center investigating productive aging, with a focus on education and the labor market. Earlier in her career, she was a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Technical University Dresden and was Senior Scientist of the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Staudinger’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of increases in average life expectancy. She investigates the potentials of aging by studying the plasticity of the aging process (e.g. cognition or personality), as well the development of life insight, life management, and wisdom over the lifespan. Her findings have yielded helpful advice for living, work, and education during this time of unprecedented demographic change.
Harvey L. Sterns, PhD in psychology, The University of Akron. His major areas of interest include industrial gerontology, life-span development, training and career development. He is Director of the Institute for Life-Span Development and Gerontology. Current research includes self-management of career and retirement, training of adult and older adult workers, personality factors, and retirement adjustment and satisfaction, as well as issues of late-career academics.
Philip Taylor, PhD in business and human resource management, is the Director of Research and Graduate Studies at Monash University. Prior to this role, he was Professor of Employment Policy at Swinburne University of Technology where he directed the Business, Work, and Ageing Centre for Research. He has researched and written in the field of age and the labour market for more than 20 years. He leads a major program of research on ageing workforces. Interests include the management of labour supply, individual orientations to work and retirement, employers’ attitudes and practices towards older workers and international developments in public policies aimed at combating age barriers in the labour market and prolonging working life.
Julie M. Zissimopoulos, PhD in economics, joined the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC) faculty in 2014. She serves as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs at the Price School and is Associate Director of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC, one of the nation’s premier health policy research institutions. She is also Co-Director of USC’s Resource Center for Minority Aging Research, funded by the National Institute on Aging, and a network associate of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society. She was previously a senior economist at the RAND Corporation. She specializes in the economics of aging. Topics of special interest are savings and wealth, work at middle and older ages, financial and non-financial support between generations of family members and medical expenditures. She is a frequent speaker on the economics of aging and her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, on California Public Radio, PBS Newshour, and other media. Dr. Zissimopoulos received her B.A. summa cum laude from Boston College, her M.A. degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.