News Release

Matilda White Riley, Distinguished Gerontologist, Dies

November 18, 2004

Matilda White Riley died earlier this week at her home in Maine. Professor Riley began her distinguished career as a student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard. She and her husband Jack Riley were members of the Rutgers faculty during the 1960s. In 1973 she left Rutgers to become the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bowdoin College. The founding director of the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Robert Butler, recruited Professor Riley to set up and direct the NIA's behavioral and social science program in 1979. She continued her work at the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health for over twenty years. During this time she also served as President of the American Sociological Association in 1985, co-president (with her husband) of the District of Columbia Sociological Society for 1984-85, and chair of the ASA Section on Aging in 1989. In 2000, at age 89, she left Washington to return to Bowdoin College as honorary research professor in Sociology.

According the National Academies, "Riley, almost single-handedly, created age stratification as a scientific field, demonstrating the interaction of aging over the life course with historical time, and the interdependencies of social, psychological and biological processes. She has shown how cohorts age in different ways with social change affecting family, work and other social institutions."