Carol D. Ryff is Director of the Institute on Aging and Hilldale Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  For the past two decades, Dr. Ryff has been Principal Investigator of the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national longitudinal study, whose rich multidisciplinary data have engaged researchers around the world, with 1,800+ publications appearing in top tier journals across scientific fields.  She also directed MIDJA (Midlife in Japan), for which she received an NIH Merit Award.  A major objective of these studies is biopsychosocial integration – i.e., understanding pathways to health or illness via linkage of sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race, socioeconomic status) with behavioral, psychological, and social factors, including stress exposures and contextual influences.  Extensive emphasis is also given to physiological and neurological mechanisms that link these differing influences to morbidity and mortality.  Her own research focuses on a model of psychological well-being she developed in 1989, which is used widely used in diverse investigations.  Her measures of well-being have been translated to 40 languages.  Dr. Ryff own work focuses on how psychological well-being changes with age, how it is contoured by educational status and cultural context as well as by the challenges and transitions of adult life. Whether well-being is protective of good physical health is a major interest, with numerous findings linking different aspects of well-being to morbidity and mortality, via diverse biomarkers (neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular) and neural circuitry.  A guiding theme is resilience – how some are able to maintain, or regain, well-being in the face of adversity and what neurobiology underlies this capacity. Increasingly, she is interested in how the arts and humanities as well as encounters with nature matter for well-being and health.