Dr. Carol Ryff is professor of psychology and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She will be visiting OSU as a guest of the provost and the deans of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Engineering.

Carol’s visit will highlight the developing partnerships among the three colleges in efforts to build healthier communities through arts and science.

Carol Ryff’s primary expertise is in studying psychological well-being, which she has linked to sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race, educational status, cultural context), life experiences (early life adversity, parenting, chronic and acute life stressors), behavior (exercise, sleep), physiology (inflammatory markers, cardiovascular risk factors) and mortality.

She directs the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national study of Americans as well as a parallel study in Japan known as MIDJA (Midlife in Japan).

A new interest involves bringing the arts and humanities into integrative, multidisciplinary studies of health and well-being.