Profile: John Nesselroade
John Nesselroade may be in the business of getting old, but for him, the work never does.
Nesselroade, the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of Psychology, is a leading authority on quantitative research methods in the field of lifespan development and particularly, in his case, the aging process. He has spent more than 40 years on and around the subject, first at West Virginia University, then at Penn State. For the past 15 years he has been both a building block and the glue for a lifespan development program at Virginia that has quickly earned itself a stellar international reputation.
It was six or seven years into his U.Va. career that Nesselroade sought grant support from the National Institute on Aging to fund a lifespan development training program. “Basically,” he says, “I was looking to take our Ph.D. candidates and make little John Nesselroades out of them.” He was turned down because the school had no aging research program in place.
So, he went to then-department chair Peter Brunjes and the two put the wheels in motion to build one. They hired Tim Salthouse, an internationally recognized researcher in the field. “Suddenly, we had visibility in aging and we applied again for the training grant,” Nesselroade says. “It’s now in its fifth year. Three of our trainees finished this year, and one is going to Michigan State, one is going to Penn State, and one is going to University of California-Davis. You can’t produce people much better than that.”
In the meantime, the department gained the part-time services of Paul Baltes, one of the driving forces in the creation of the lifespan development discipline.
This “dream team” of researchers is poised to take advantage of increased funding opportunities brought on by the coming of (old) age of the baby boomer generation. Issues such as the measurement of cognitive abilities are burning bright on more radar screens than ever before as Salthouse, Nesselroade and the overall team explore a wide array of questions such as how people may be able to compensate for the inevitable cognitive declines that come with getting older.
He is continually re-energized by the young researchers in the field, many of whom are, in fact, “little John Nesselroades.” Nesselroade has turned out some 50 Ph.D.s in his career, and many of them are very visible in the field today. One of those students, Stephen Boker, has been at Notre Dame for 10 years since receiving his doctorate and recently accepted a position to come back to join Nesselroade’s team.
The mentor could not be more excited. “He’s so good it makes your hair stand up.”
Aging issues aside, slowing down does not seem to be in Nesselroade’s plans. “Every day I still say to myself, ‘You are the luckiest guy in the world to have a job that is so much fun and where they pay you reasonably well to think about things,’” Nesselroade says. “It’s incredible.”
