Chair and Director: Dr. John F. Watkins
The Graduate Center for Gerontology at the University of Kentucky maintains the following definition as central to its teaching and research missions:
…the scholarly and applied study of the processes, conditions, and situations associated with aging across the life span with attention to later life.
Or as a short-hand version we offer:
…the processes and states of becoming and being an older adult.
We hold to these definitions first because they best acknowledge the increasing diversity and complexity of aging in contemporary societies, and also because they capture the importance of promoting holistic and critically integrative perspectives within both scholarship and practice.
