Laura Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and a noted expert on socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation. She is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. 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 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The recipient of numerous professional awards and honors, she has been selected as a Guggenheim Fellow, and she received the Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Research and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America.
