I grew up in Germany and did my graduate work and Ph.D. at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland where I studied the way in which infants’ development is promoted by interaction and joint activities with their mothers. In 1984, I joined the Center for Life-Span Psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where over the years I became a senior scientist with my own research group. In the 1980s and 90s, I expanded my research area to include development in adulthood and old age, formulated the life-span theory of control with my collaborator Richard Schulz, Ph.D., and launched a research program to test its propositions and applicability to developmental regulation in adulthood. In 1995/96, I was a fellow at the Center for Social and Behavioral Science at Stanford, and in 2015/16 I was a fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research , University Bielefeld, Germany. In 2000, I joined the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at UC Irvine and constituted the research laboratory on Life-Span Development and Motivation. My undergraduate and graduate teaching is in the areas of life-span development and motivational psychology.

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