Biography

Christopher A. Langston, Ph.D., is Program Director at The John A. Hartford Foundation of New York. He is responsible for the Foundation’s grantmaking in support of its mission to enhance the nation’s capacity to care for its older citizens. The Foundation works to increase the geriatric care expertise of professionals in the fields of medicine, nursing, and social work and to develop and test innovative models of care that will provide improved care to older adults.

Dr. Langston re-joined the Hartford Foundation after two years at The Atlantic Philanthropies where he worked as a program executive on the U.S. Ageing Team in the Human Capital Development subprogram in aging and health. While at Atlantic, he worked with the National Council on Aging in a national partnership with the federal Administration on Aging to support the adoption of the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program and other evidence-based programs for health promotion. He also helped develop initial grant support to form the Direct Care Alliance, a new organization for paraprofessional workers to advance quality care for older adults and quality jobs for workers in long-term care.

Before joining Atlantic in 2005, he worked for 8 years at the John A. Hartford Foundation, rising to Senior Program Officer. At Hartford, he had responsibility for a variety of health education and quality improvement demonstrations related to health care for older persons. These included a 40 school initiative to incorporate geriatric care into the medical school curriculum through the Association of American Medical Colleges and project IMPACT, the largest randomized controlled trial of depression treatment among older adults.

Dr. Langston earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Personality and Social Psychology in 1990. He then taught for five years at Purdue University’s Department of Psychological Sciences. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Geriatric Center’s Polisher Research Center from 1995 to 1997.