Laureate 2014
Laureates 2014
The psychologist and aging researcher Prof. Dr. Ursula M. Staudinger is to receive the 2014 Braunschweig Research Prize. The prize is in recognition of the 55-year-old’s outstanding research work on the plasticity of the aging process and its consequences for demographic change. Staudinger is currently establishing globally unique interdisciplinary research centre at Columbia University: The Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.
In face of a society characterised by longevity, Ursula M. Staudinger researches the potentials of aging. She examines the interaction between productivity and aging and the development of life insight, life management and wisdom over the life span.
Evidence
"The Braunschweig Research Prize is awarded for outstanding interdisciplinary research work which intertwine science, business and Society. Demographic change is a topic which affects us all. We must react to the challenges which an aging society presents us with. The prize-winner focusses her research on the topic of aging in a working environment.
It is important to Prof. Staudinger that employers recognise and promote the skills which older people have. This is a key issue for the future: will we succeed in integrating and recognising the skills and experience of older employees and harness these? It is therefore important to me that we honour the work of Prof. Staudinger with this Braunschweig Research Prize”.
(Ulrich Markurth, Mayor of Braunschweig )
“With Ursula M. Staudinger we recognise an internationally leading aging researcher. Faced with the current demographic change, her research on the potentials of aging are a key issue for the future of how we live, work and educate. As a development psychologist, she continuously seeks interdisciplinary links to neurosciences, social sciences and health sciences as well as to work and education research fields which are well represented in Braunschweig’s research institutions". Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. h.c. Jürgen Hesselbach.
President of Braunschweig Technical University
Profile: Prof. Dr. Ursula M. Staudinger
Staudinger has been Founding Director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University, New York since July 2013. Prior to that she was Vice President of Jacobs University in Bremen and Founding Decan at Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development.
Earlier positions included the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin and the Technical University of Dresden. Staudinger studied psychology at the University of Erlangen and at Clark University, Massachusetts (USA). She became Doctor of Philosophy in 1988 and achieved professorship at the Free University of Berlin in 1997.
Prof. Dr. Staudinger advises the German Government on aging issues and is also Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and their Foreign Secretary. She is Chairwoman of the Curatorship for the Federal Institute for Population Research and Member of the Academy of Europe.