Jennifer (Jenny) Sasser, Ph.D. is an educational gerontologist, transdisciplinary scholar, and community activist. Jenny has been working in the field of gerontology for more than half her life, beginning as a nursing assistant and senior citizen advocate before focusing on scholarly inquiry and education. As an undergraduate she attended Willamette University, in Salem, Oregon, graduating Cum Laude in Psychology and Music; her interdisciplinary graduate studies at University of Oregon and Oregon State University focused on the Human Sciences, with specialization areas in adult development and aging, womens studies, and critical social theory and alternative research methodologies. Jennys dissertation became part of a book published by Routledge in 1996 and co-authored with Dr. Janet Lee-- Blood Stories: Menarche and the Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary US Society . For the past twenty years, she has focused her inquiry in the areas of creativity in later life; aging and embodiment; transdisciplinary curriculum design; Critical Gerontological theory; transformational adult learning practices; and cross-generational collaborative inquiry.
Jenny served as Chair of the Department of Human Sciences and Founding Director of Gerontology at Marylhurst University, in Portland, Oregon, from 1999 to 2015. In 2016, Jenny joined the part-time faculty in the Gerontology program at Portland Community College. Her other commitments include co-authoring Aging: Concepts and controversies (with Harry R. Moody); convening the Gero-Punk Project); serving as a conversation facilitator for Oregon Humanities; and offering consulting, workshops and presentations. Harry R. Moody, Ph.D ., is retired Vice President for of Academic Affairs for AARP.
DC. He iscurrently Visiting Professor at Tohoku University in Japan, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar atFielding Graduate University. He previously served as Executive Director of the Brookdale Centeron Aging at Hunter College and Chairman of the Board of Elderhostel (now Road Scholar). Moody is the author of over 100 scholarly articles, as well as a number of books including: Abundance of Life: Human Development Policies for an Aging Society (Columbia University Press,1988); Ethics in an Aging Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and co-author of Aging: Concepts and Controversies , a gerontology textbook (co-authored with Jennifer Sasser) now in its 9th edition. His book, The Five Stages of the Soul , was published by Doubleday Anchor Books and has been translatedinto seven languages worldwide.