Toni Antonucci. Image credit: Courtesy ISR Life Course Development ProgramANN ARBOR—University of Michigan psychologist Toni Antonucci will receive the 2012 Distinguished Career Contribution to Gerontology Award from the Gerontological Society of America, the nation’s largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to the field of aging.

Antonucci is the associate vice president for research, social sciences and humanities at U-M, the Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology, and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research. She also chairs Society 2030, an innovative consortium bringing together U-M researchers and corporate leaders to prepare for society’s changing age structure.

She will receive the award at the Gerontological Society’s annual meeting, which will be held in November in San Diego.

Antonucci studies social relations and health across the lifespan, and has conducted multigenerational studies of the family and comparative studies of social relations across the lifespan in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. She is known for her role in developing the convoy model of social relations, a widely used approach to understanding continuity and change in social relationships from childhood through old age.

In 2011, Antonucci received the Masterpiece Living Robert L. Kahn Award for Lifetime Achievement in Promoting Successful Aging for her work aimed at improving the quality of life among older adults. She is a member of the MacArthur Network on Aging Societies and recently received a MacArthur Foundation grant to apply the principles of successful aging to affordable housing facilities. For more information about this project, see: www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/research/testing-successful-aging-program-with-low-income-seniors.

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest digital social science data archive. For more information, visit the ISR website at www.isr.umich.edu.