• 2018 Karen Hooker
  School of Social and Behavioral Health Sciences Co-director, Professor Karen Hooker came to Oregon State in 1994 and has held roles as the director of the Program on Gerontology, Human Development and Family Sciences interim department chair, founding director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research and the Jo Anne Leonard Petersen Endowed Chair in Gerontology and Family Studies. She earned a master’s degree in psychology from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and a PhD in Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University in Pennsylvania.

• 2017 Carol Ryff
  Dr. Ryff's research is strongly multidisciplinary and focuses on how various aspects of psychological well-being are contoured by broad social structural influences such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and culture as well as how psychological well-being is linked with biological factors (e.g., neuroendocrine regulation, inflammatory processes, cardiovascular risk). The latter work addresses the mechanisms and pathways through which well-being may confer protection against illness and disease. Resilience is an overarching theme in putting these many levels of analysis (social structural, psychosocial, neurobiological) together. She currently directs the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national study of Americans (www.midus.wisc.edu), which has become a major forum for integrative, multidisciplinary studies of health and well-being, as well as a parallel study in Japan known as MIDJA (Midlife in Japan).

• 2016 Tom Hess
  A distinguished professor of psychology at NC State, Hess is among the world’s leading researchers on the effects of aging on cognition. In his 35-year career at the university, he’s published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, delivered dozens of public talks and lectures and authored and co-authored four edited books. His writings have been cited nearly 3,500 times by researchers around the world.

• 2015 Richard Schulz
  Richard Schulz is Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, Director of Gerontology, and Associate Director of the Aging Institute of UPMC Senior Services and the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Schulz has spent most of his career doing research and writing on adult development and aging. His work has focused on social-psychological aspects of aging, including the impact of disabling late life disease on patients and their families.

• 2014 Jutta Heckhausen
  Professor, Psychology & Social Behavior, School of Social Ecology, University of California – Irvine. Professor Heckhausen’s general areas of interest are: life-span developmental psychology, motivational psychology, control behavior, psychological influences on health, and developmental regulation across the life span. Her ongoing research addresses the role of the individual as an active agent in major life-course transitions and when confronted with challenging life events.

• 2013 Roger Dixon
  Canada Research Chair in Cognition and Aging, Director of Alberta Cognitive Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology at University of Alberta.
  For over three decades, Dr. Roger Dixon has contributed seminal theoretical, methodological, and empirical understanding of changes in cognition within and across individuals as they age. As co-founder and principal investigator of the Victoria Longitudinal Study, Dr. Dixon and his colleagues continue to break new ground with long-term studies of health, cognition, life-style environment, biomedical, physiological and social-affective factors contributing to human aging.

• 2012 Suzanne Corkin
  Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, Emerita at MIT. Dr. Corkin has had a long-standing commitment to investigating the biological bases of human memory systems, cognitive and neural characteristics of healthy aging, and natural history and pathophysiology of degenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
  

• 2011 Christopher Hertzog
  Professor of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Christopher Hertzog has made some of the most profound and lasting contributions to the study of adult behavioral development. Together with Paul Baltes, John Horn, John Nesselroade, and Karl W. Schaie, he has been pivotal in creating and establishing the lifespan approach in developmental psychology and gerontology. His research interest covers cognitive, developmental and lifespan psychology, and he is also an outstanding multivariate methodologist. Currently, he focuses on age-related declines in basic mechanisms of cognition, memory, and information processing, related to understanding `successful cognitive aging.` Of particular interest to him are metacognition and strategic self-regulation – evaluating how people monitor and adapt their behavior in tasks to improve their performance.
  
  
• 2010 Arthur Wingfield
  Nancy Lurie Marks Professor of Neuroscience, Brandeis University
  Director, Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Wingfield`s research interests span across the interaction between sensory and cognitive change on speech recognition and memory, the genetic contributions to sensory and cognitive functions, and the effects of speech rate and content complexity on language comprehension and memory.
  
  
• 2009 Sherry L. Willis
  Professor of Human Development, Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Willis is lifespan psychologist with a primary focus on cognitive development in middle adulthood and aging. Her major research interest is on how cognitive functioning changes across the adult lifespan - including both basic cognitive abilities and everyday problem solving.
  
  
• 2008 David F. Hultsch
  Director, Centre on Aging, and Lansdowne Professor of Psychology, University of Victoria. Dr. Hultsch`s research is devoted to adult development and aging. He has paid special attention to contextual factors of aging. Prominent among these are individual differences in aging-related change, and patterns and predictors of actual cognitive (memory) changes. Herein, he has played a major role in designing and implementing the famous Victoria Longitudinal Study.
  
  
• 2007 Leah Light
  Professor of Psychology, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. Dr. Light`s research interests lie in cognition and aging, with a particular focus on differentiating aspects of memory that are well-preserved in old age from those that are more negatively affected. Her most recent work deals with issues relating to the formation of new associations and their subsequent retrieval.

• 2006 Jochen Philipp Ziegelmann
  Senior research scientist at the Free University of Berlin`s department of health psychology. His dissertation dealt with "Self-Regulation and Successful Aging: Adoption and Maintenance of Health Behaviors Across the Lifespan". (Summary) Currently, this work continues within the international and multidisciplinary research consortium "Fostering Lifelong Autonomy and Resources in Europe Behavior and Successful Aging (www.health-and-aging.de" which is part of the funding scheme "Future Leaders of Ageing Research in Europe" of the German Federal Ministry of Research.
  
  
• 2005 Colleen M. Parks
  University of California, Davis
  
  
• 2004 Stuart W.S. MacDonald
  Ph.D., University of Victoria, British Columbia
  Stuart MacDonald`s research lies primarily within two research traditions: individual differences in cognitive aging and the cognitive neuroscience of aging. He examines patterns and predictors of cognitive decline in the healthy elderly, as well as for the developmental transition between primary and secondary aging (e.g., accelerated memory loss due to morbidity). In particular, he is interested in the early identification of risk factors (genetic, biological, psychological) that foreshadow cognitive impairment associated with age, dementia onset, and subsequent death.
  
• 2003 Quinn Kennedy
  formerly Stanford University.
  
  
• 2002 Nina Knoll
  Senior researcher at the Institute of Medical Psychology, Center for Human and Health Sciences of the Berlin Medical department. Received her PhD at the Free University of Berlin for her work on "Coping as a personality process: How elderly patients deal with cataract surgery"
  (Dissertation online http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/2002/108/).

• 2001 Mara Mather
  Associate Professor of Gerontology, Psychology and the Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Southern California, Emotion & Cognition Lab.top of page

Margret and Paul Baltes Award for outstanding dissertations in developmental psychology, awarded by the German Psychological Society DGPs

• 2015 Co-Winners Marie Schäfer and Anne K. Reitz Ms. Schäfer's dissertation was entitled "Cultural variation in children‘s development of ressource sharing and faireness". Ms Reitz's disseration was entitled "Adaptation of adolescence in social context: integrating developmental, acculturative and intergroup approaches."

• 2013 Myriam Sander
  In her dissertation, Ms. Sander uses behavioral and electrophysiological markers of capacity and selectivity to study lifespan age differences in working memory

• 2011 Co-Winners Julia Dietrich and Ina Schöllgen
  In her dissertation, Ms. Schöllgen asks how socio-economic status, i.e. education, income, and financial assets, influences a person’s health in the second half of her life. Ms. Schöllgen approaches this intriguing question of developmental psychology in an original way and on an excellent methodological and theoretical level. Using data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS), she shows that social inequalities in health were rather stable or increasing over age. Ms. J. Dietrich’s dissertation deals with young people’s dealing with the transition from school to secondary education, seen from the perspective of self-regulation. Her central question is the exploration of youth with respect to vocational or professional preferences and its interaction with parental support. She tests to what extent parental support adapts itself to the transition and how far parents adapt to youth development. In sum, this dissertation reaches a very high methodological level and leads to theoretically and practically relevant findings on the interaction of parental expectations and career exploration.

• 2009 Julia Karbach
  The award acknowledges an elaborate study on training of executive control functions in different age groups (children, young and older adults). The study is an important contribution to understanding age-related changes in trainability of executive control functions and shows potential and limits of different training options. Dr. Karbach`s findings are of high relevance to fundamental research as well as application.
  
  
• 2007 Eva-Marie Kessler
  Her work on the "Intergenerational Potential: Psychological effects of interaction between elder and young people" earned Eva-Marie Kessler the doctorate from the International University Bremen (today Jacobs University). Currently, she is postdoc at the University of Mannheim.
  (Summary in German)
  
  
• 2003 Hedwig van Bakel
  Tilburg University
  Today Assistant Professor at the University Tilburg, Hedwig van Bakel received the award for her dissertation on "Infants and their parents: development in a social context". (Summary)
  
  
• 2001 Claudia Ruff
  Received the doctoral degree in psychology from the Technical University of Braunschweig with her work on Native language acquisition of German and Italian children (Summary in German). Today she is psychologist for children and youth in private practice.
  
  
• 2001 Susanne Völker
  Did her doctorate at the University of Osnabrück with "An Analysis of interaction patterns between mother and child in the third month of life: The role of warmth and contingency". (Summary in German)
  
  
• 2000 Jutta Kray
  Received her doctorate the Free University of Berlin and spent her time as doctoral student at the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Today she is junior professor for developmental psychology at the University of Saar. Her dissertation dealt with Adult age differences in task switching: Components, generalizability, and modifiability. (Summary)

• 2014 Eva-Marie Kessler
  Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Abteilung für Psychologische Alternsforschung
  Psychologisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg

• 2010 Daniel Zimprich
  Psychological Gerontology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich
  PD Dr. Zimprich was awarded for his innovative contributions to the longitudinal study of cognition, learning, personality and health behavior in old age. His main fields of research are: cognitive aging and learning, methods of longitudinal research, and subjective cognitive complaints in old age.
  
  
• 2006 Katja Werheid
  Senior research scientist at the Institute for Clinical Psychology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Katja Werheid has analysed the influence of emotions on the memory capacity in old age and in age-related memory disorders. Her research is of theoretical relevance for modelling the interaction between emotion and cognition over the lifespan but is also of practical importance for the rehabilitation of memory disorders in early stages of dementia.
  
  
• 2004 Daniela Jopp
  Today Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
  
  
• 2000 Mike Martin
  Today Professor of Psychology at the University of Zurich, he received the award for the combination of fundamental, longitudinal cognitive research and applied gerontological research in the field of planning performance and prospective memory. His contribution was corresponded the international level and was exemplary not only considering the early stage of his career.

• 2017 Giyeon Kim
  Dr. Kim is an associate professor within the Alabama Research Institute on Aging and Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama. Effective this September, she will become an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses primarily on racial and ethnic disparities in mental health and mental health service use among older adults. Kim’s work has been supported by grants including a highly coveted National Institutes of Health Career Development Award (NIA K01) examining barriers and facilitators to mental health service use among racially/ethnically diverse older adults, and the role of geography in racial disparities in mental health service use among older adults. She has been involved in several projects relating to mental health disparities and has extensive experience with various racial and ethnic groups, including non-Hispanic Whites, African Americans, Latinos (Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans), Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Korean), and American Indians/Alaska Natives.

• 2016 Susanne V. Wurm
  Dr. Wurm is a professor of psychogerontology and the deputy director of the Institute of Psychogerontology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her work focuses on the promotion of healthy aging. Based on a psychological life-span perspective, she examines different psychosocial resources in their impact on health and longevity, while integrating epidemiological and sociological perspectives into her research. Most recently, she has examined the role of individual views on aging, how they can act as self-fulfilling prophecy, and how these views can be changed within the context of interventions.

• 2015 Nilam Ram
  Dr. Ram is currenlty an Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, and Psychology at Penn State. His work focuses on longitudinal research methodology and life-span development — particularly in how within-person/intra-individual change and variability study designs can contribute to the understanding of human behavior. He is developing and applying novel longitudinal methods in ways that address fundamental questions about behavioral change.

• 2014 Corinna E. Löckenhoff
  Dr. Löckenhoff  is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University.Her groundbreaking research revolves around age differences in socioemotional functioning and their implications for health-related decision making and outcomes. Recently she has focused on translating findings from laboratory-based decision-making paradigms to real-world healthcare settings. Her work also has major implications for understanding barriers to optimal decision making among older adults and their loved ones who are facing challenging choices in the face of life-threatening illnesses. A driving theme throughout her career is the belief that the foundations for healthy aging begin early in life and her work takes a holistic view of life-long health. As such, her research program focuses on the role of stressful life events, social relationships, and balancing present and future well-being.

• 2013 Stuart MacDonald
  Dr. MacDonald is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria.His research focuses on cognitive aging and early identification of those at risk for cognitive decline and disease, such as Alzheimer's disease.  He is a long-standing member and now co-investigator of the Victoria Longitudinal Study, and a collaborator of the Aging Research Center at the Karolinska Institute. He also leads the PREVENT study at the University of Victoria, the goal of which is to search for markers, both biological and behavioral, that may be present before the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease begin to show.

• 2012 Christiane Hoppmann
  Dr. Hoppmann currently is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where she also directs the Health and Adult Development Laboratory. Her research blends theoretical sophistication and cutting-edge methodology in the fields of lifespan human development and health psychology. Her ambitious research agenda involves understanding the proximal and distal mechanisms linking social interrelations to long-term developmental outcomes.

• 2011 Dennis Gerstorf
  In July 2011, Dennis Gerstorf joined the faculty at the Institute of Psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin as a professor of developmental psychology. His primary research interests include heterogeneity and differential development in old and advanced old age. His studies have demonstrated that major life events, such as impending death, come along with lasting changes in well-being. Gerstorf has found that levels of life satisfaction decline quite rapidly as individuals approach death. Using advanced multivariate growth curve modeling, his research also has shown that well-being is not only a consequence of, but also a source for, successful aging outcomes.

• 2010 Helene Hoi Lam FUNG
  Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  Main research interest of Fung is the study of how goals change across adulthood and their impacts on social relationships, emotional regulation, and cognition. She has contributed much to the study of psychology and ageing in Hong Kong and also throughout the rest of China. Fung is currently developing new tools and research designs for cross-cultural comparisons on the regulation of social relation and time perspective across the life span between China, Europe, and the U.S.
  
  
• 2009 Derek M. Isaacowitz
  Associate Professor of Psychology, Brandeis University.
  Dr. Isaacowitz's expertise field is Emotion and Aging. He studies how emotional experiences change with age, and how individual differences in predictors of emotion( e.g. optimism) may change through adulthood.
  
  
• 2008 Anthony D. Ong
  Anthony D. Ong is currently Assistant Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Director of the Resilience and Lifespan Development Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Southern California and completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the socio-emotional, cognitive, and cultural resources that people draw upon to adapt to stressful life circumstances as they age. A central goal is to understand how certain individuals show maintenance, recovery, or even improvements in adaptive outcomes despite the presence of challenge and adversity.
  
  
• 2007 Lynn M. Martire
  Dr. Martire is Associate Professor or Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the impact of family interactions on the health and well-being of ill older adults, and the potential benefit of including a close family member in psychological or behavioral interventions for late-life chronic illness. Her work has appeared in the top aging journals (e.g., Psychology and Aging), health psychology journals (e.g., Health Psychology) and medical journals (e.g., JAMA).
  
  
• 2006 Julie Ann McMullin
  Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. McMullin is an internationally recognized scholar in the area of aging and the life course. She has examined workforce aging, the proliferation of employment in information technology, and new economy issues in Canada, the United States, the European Union, and Australia. Dr. McMullin`s research focuses on how class, age, gender, ethnicity, and race structure inequality in paid work and families.
  
  Referenz: Understanding Social Inequality: Class, Age, Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Canada (2004) Oxford University Press.
  
  
• 2005 Kaarin Anstey
  Associate Professor and Director of the Ageing Research Unit of the Australian National University. Understanding cognitive ageing is Dr. Anstey`s central passion, her other interests include mood and depression, psychometrics, the measurement of change, and behavioral consequences of a variety of illnesses, functional limitations or losses (e.g., driving capacity). http://cmhr.anu.edu.au/ageing/
  
  
• 2004 Brent J. Small
  Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. Brent Small sees himself as strongly influenced by the works of Margret and Paul Baltes. He examines changes in cognitive performance during the preclininal phases of the Alzheimer disease. With his research he hopes to contribute to identifying high risk persons who should undergo prophylactic treatment.
  
  
• 2003 Becca Levy
  http://publichealth.yale.edu/faculty/levy.html
  Associate Professor of Psychology at the Yale School of Public Health. Becca Levy`s research explores psychosocial influences on aging. Her studies focus on how psychological factors, particularly older individuals` perceptions of aging, affect cognition and health in old age. She studies this by examining: 1) how psychosocial factors influence recovery and survival in old age; 2) how the aging process differs in cultures that hold diverse views of aging; and 3) how interventions, designed to trigger either positive or negative age stereotypes, influences a variety of outcomes in older individuals including memory, physical performance and cardiovascular response to stress.
  
  
• 2002 Hayden B. Bosworth
  Associate Professor of health psychology at the Duke University`s Medical School. Hayden Bosworth examined the antecedents of poor blood pressure control in a sample of veterans with hypertension. This observational study helped identify important patient characteristics which became the cornerstone of a theoretical model that he developed to explain what behaviors to focus on in self management interventions. (Summary)
  
  
• 2001 Manfred Diehl
  Professor of Human Development and Family Studies; Director of the Center on Aging, Colorado State University. Manfred Diehl has worked on social and emotional development in adulthood and old age. In particular, the Margret M. Baltes Award recognized that he had published several articles that showed that older adults coped with stress and conflict in a more mature and effective way than younger adults. Moreover, the Award also recognized his contributions in the area of personality development in adulthood. (Summary)
  
  
• 2000 Frieder Lang
  Professor of Psychogerontology at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. The award was given to merit his work on regulation of social relationships in later adulthood. (Summary)
  http://www.geronto.uni-erlangen.de/personen/lang.shtml (deutsch)
  http://www.geronto.uni-erlangen.org/personen/lang.shtml (english)
  
  
• 1999 Karen L. Fingerman
  Associate Professor of developmental and family research at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
  Dr. Fingerman`s work examines regulation of emotions in interpersonal relationships. Her early research examined problems in relationships between aging mothers and their adult daughters, and relied on self-report, partner report, and observational data. She also has examined grandparents` worries, irritations, and disappointments with each of their grandchildren. Her recent research has focused on age differences in emotional experiences with members of the social network. She conducted a study of holiday cards as well as a study of close, problematic and ambivalent social network members. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as well as by several foundations.