Biography
Merril Silverstein, PhD, is inaugural holder of the Marjorie Cantor Chair in Aging Studies at Syracuse University and serves as professor in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Human Development and Family Science. Professor Silverstein received his doctorate in Sociology from Columbia University, after which he served on the faculty of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. In over 200 research publications, he has focused on ageing in the context of family life, with an emphasis on intergenerational relations over the life course and international-comparative perspectives. Professor Silverstein currently serves as principal investigator for the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which has collected data from the same families for over fifty years, and is co-originator of the Longitudinal Study of Older Adults in Anhui Province, China, now in its 20th year. Professor Silverstein is a Fellow of the Brookdale Foundation, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program, the Gerontological Society of America, and the James Martin School at Oxford University. Between 2010-2014, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. In 2019, he was awarded the Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award from the Section on Aging and the Life Course of the American Sociological Association.
Keynote Presentation (2024) | Filial Piety and its Discontents in Rural China: How Coresidence and Migration of Adult Children Shift Perceptions by Older Parents
