About Us

Who We Are

The Gerontology Center is primarily a research unit, but one with an academic and a generative function. Center researchers are interested in all areas of aging, but are distinguished by seminal research in cognition, communication and aging, long-term health care and housing alternatives, and decision making in later life.

The Center's academic function has two dimensions. First, the Center's core investigators hold half-time appointments in academic departments, meeting the mission of those units but also offering courses on age and aging. Second, the Center administers the Gerontology Doctoral Program, a free-standing degree program of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that is governed by affiliated faculty drawn from various academic units. The Graduate Certificate in Gerontology is likewise hosted in the Gerontology Center.

The Center represents gerontology on the campus, being essentially a local vector for a major field of interdisciplinary research and scholarship. Expertise about age and aging is distributed across the campus; curiosity and initiative also arise independently among faculty and students. We are called frequently to respond to this interest and nurture it as a convener, clearinghouse, catalyst, and advocate for gerontology. Doing this is highly beneficial to our explicit research and educational responsibilities.

History of the KU Gerontology Center

Gerontology, as the study of aging, is far from being a modern fascination.  Observations about life change and longevity have been recorded across all of history.  Classical and biblical sources abound with descriptions of long life spans as well as explanations for such good fortune.  But it was not until longevity was “democratized” in the twentieth century that gerontology and geriatrics (the health care of older people) were formally organized as scientific and professional specialty fields.

Gerontology’s appearance in higher education, typically as an interdisciplinary endeavor, accelerated across the 1960s and 1970s, propelled by three developments: rising scholarly interests among faculty; increased student demand for instruction in age-related topics; and the availability of federal research and training funds from the new National Institute on Aging, created in 1975, and the Administration on Aging.  The latter agency administered the Older Americans Act of 1965 which directed discretionary funds to higher education for the purpose of building knowledge, developing model programs, and training personnel for service in the field of aging (Achenbaum, 1995).  This federal support had a catalytic effect on the development of interdisciplinary gerontology centers on U.S. campuses, including the University of Kansas, where a Gerontology Center was initiated in 1977. Read more...