Louise Hawkley
Dr. Louise Hawkley is a Principal Research Scientist in the Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research contributions are predominantly in the area of perceived social isolation (loneliness) and health during aging, including identification of factors that increase risk for loneliness and the types of interventions that offer some benefit to lonely people. She is a co-investigator on the NIA-funded panel study, the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP), and the Principal Investigator of the NSHAP COVID supplemental study which ran from September 2020 to January 2021. Her applied work has been funded by the AARP Foundation and the Retirement Research Foundation. She is an active interdisciplinary collaborator who works with sociologists, physicians, epidemiologists, primatologists, and demographers to better understand the complexities of social life, especially during aging. Her publications include more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is a member of the Gerontological Society of America and the American Society on Aging, and serves on the editorial board of Research on Aging and Social Science & Medicine. She is an international speaker, and served as an expert witness for the solitary confinement case, Ashker v. Governor of California, 2015. Dr. Hawkley is a founding member of the International Loneliness and Isolation Research Network (ILINK), and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Foundation for Social Connection.