Bio

Carol D. Ryff is Director of the Institute on Aging and Hilldale Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Ryff is Principal Investigator of the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national longitudinal study, which has engaged researchers around the world, with 2,000 publications appearing in top journals across scientific fields. She also directed MIDJA (Midlife in Japan), for which she received an NIH Merit Award. A major objective of these studies is to understand long-term pathways to health or illness via linkage of sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race, socioeconomic status) with behavioral, psychological, and social factors, including stress exposures and contextual influences. Emphasis is also given to physiological and neurological mechanisms that link these influences to morbidity and mortality. Her own research focuses on a model of psychological well-being she developed in 1989, which is widely – the measures have been translated to 40 languages.

Dr. Ryff’s own work focuses on how psychological well-being changes with age, how it is contoured by educational status and cultural context as well as by the challenges and transitions of adult life. Whether well-being is protective of good physical health is a major interest. A guiding theme is resilience – how some are able to maintain, or regain, well-being in the face of adversity and what neurobiology underlies this capacity. Increasingly, she is interested in how the arts and humanities as well as encounters with nature matter for well-being and health.

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