Laura L. Carstensen is Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, a new interdisciplinary initiative focused on using increased life-expectancy to improve quality of life at all ages. For more than twenty years her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging and in 2005 she was honored with a MERIT award which extends this support another decade. Carstensen is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation. Her most current empirical research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing. Carstensen recently chaired two National Research Council Committees on future directions in aging and currently serves on the Board of Science Advisors (Beirat) to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In 2003, she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2006 she received the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America. Professor Carstensen received a BS from the University of Rochester and a MA and PhD from West Virginia University.

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