Karl Pillemer is professor of human development and director of the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute at Cornell University. His interests center on human development over the life course, with a special emphasis on family and social relationships in middle age and beyond. His research, funded over the past 10 years by the National Institutes of Health, involves family members who provide care to Alzheimer’s disease victims, examining the relationships among social network structure, social support, and psychological well-being. A second major interest is in intergenerational relations in later life, with a focus on determinants and consequences of the quality of adult child-parent relationships (including international comparative work on this topic). Over the past two decades, Pillemer has conducted a long-term program of research on conflict and abuse in families of the aged, including several related studies of the domestic abuse of elderly persons. These have included large-scale prevalence surveys in the United States and Canada, evaluations of abuse prevention and treatment programs, and longitudinal research that examines the health consequences of maltreatment. Pillemer has also conducted several studies of abuse in long-term care facilities. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University.

Earl S. Pollack is a member of the staff of the Committee on National Statistics and served as study director for this panel. Previously, he was chief of biometry at the National Cancer Institute and director of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology at the National Institute of Mental Health. More recently, he was research professor at the Biostatistics Center, George Washington University, and served as statistician for the Center to Protect Workers Rights, the construction research arm of the AFL/CIO. His interests are in chronic disease epidemiology and the analysis of observational data from large health and medical databases. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American Public Health Association. He has B.S. and M.A. degrees in statistics from the University of Minnesota and an Sc.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.

Lori A. Stiegel is associate staff director of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly in Washington, DC. She is currently directing three projects on elder abuse and older battered women with funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as the commission’s activities in its role as a partner in the National Center on Elder Abuse funded by the U.S. Administration on Aging. She serves on the board of directors of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse and is the author of Elder Abuse in the State Courts: Three Curricular Judges and Court Staff and Recommended Guidelines for State Courts