Dr. Laura L. Carstensen is a distinguished leader in lifespan development research and a preeminent authority on the psychological aspects of aging across the human lifespan. She currently holds the prestigious Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professorship in Public Policy and serves as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where she has been a faculty member since 1987. As founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity established in 2007, she has created a major interdisciplinary hub addressing the profound societal implications of increased human longevity. Dr. Carstensen earned her B.S. from the University of Rochester in 1978 and completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at West Virginia University in 1983, following which she served as an assistant professor at Indiana University before joining Stanford's faculty.
Dr. Carstensen is internationally renowned for developing socioemotional selectivity theory, a seminal framework that has fundamentally transformed understanding of developmental changes in social preferences, emotional experience, and cognitive processing from early adulthood through advanced old age. Her groundbreaking research illuminated the positivity effect, demonstrating how older adults often show a relative preference for positive information in cognitive processing, which has reshaped conventional views of emotional aging. For more than thirty years, her theoretical and empirical investigations into motivational, cognitive, and emotional aspects of aging have been continuously supported by the National Institute on Aging, reflecting the profound significance of her work. Her extensive publication record has established new paradigms for understanding how time perspective influences emotional regulation and cognitive priorities across the lifespan.
As a highly influential thought leader, Dr. Carstensen has significantly shaped the field through her service as chair of two influential National Academy of Sciences studies that produced landmark reports The Aging Mind and When I'm 64. She has served on the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on an Aging Society and as a commissioner on the Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity, extending her impact to policy and societal applications of aging research. Recognized with numerous prestigious honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Research, and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America, her contributions have been widely acknowledged by her peers. Currently as director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, she continues to lead innovative research and initiatives focused on optimizing the extended human lifespan, ensuring that longer lives represent not merely a demographic reality but a period of health, purpose, and engagement.
