Robert Waldinger, MD

Robert Waldinger, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (part-time), Director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy and Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Director of the Laboratory of Adult Development. In 2003 he became the 4th director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest longitudinal studies of adult life ever done. His current work focuses on the lifetime predictors of healthy adult development, studying 2 groups of men recruited as teenagers from Harvard College and from Boston inner city neighborhoods, and who have been part of the Study for 75 years. With grants from the National Institute on Aging, the Fidelity Foundation, and the Harvard Neurodiscovery Center, he has extended the Study to incorporate neuroscience measures to better understand the ways that life experience and neurobiology interact to foster physical and emotional wellbeing. In the current phase of this research, he is studying the 2nd generation to track the influence of childhood experience on midlife health. Dr. Waldinger received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He is the author of numerous scientific papers as well as two books. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he teaches Harvard medical students and psychiatry residents, and he is on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.