My academic training has been in gerontology, sociology, and women’s studies.  In studying resilience, I focus on how older adults recover from distressing events, persist through extreme adversities, and negotiate everyday aspirations and challenges in life.  I investigate not only the commonly-studied aspects of the psychological factors underlying resilience and how these relate to functioning, but I also examine resilience as a socio-cultural process of capacity building over the life course. I am interested in how older adults use internal and external resources to overcome adversity, specifically adversity related to health declines and chronic disease in later life.  I also investigate the mechanistic properties that enhance resilience.  I consider how resilience builds on the intricacies of spirituality and aging, and in turn how these processes relate to health outcomes.