Volume 3, Issue 4
April 25, 2007
Special Edition

Christopher Langston, PhD, Appointed Program Director

The John A. Hartford Foundation is pleased to announce that Christopher Langston, PhD, currently a program executive on the U.S. Aging Team at The Atlantic Philanthropies, has accepted the position of Program Director at the Foundation.

Since 2005, Dr. Langston has had responsibility for Atlantic’s grants to improve the quality of health care received by older adults. The central objective for this portfolio, Human Capital Development, is that health professionals (doctors, nurses, and social workers) and paraprofessionals (the frontline, direct care workers in long-term care) should be better able to care for their clients and patients. Additionally, this grantmaking has focused on empowering older adults and their families to participate more effectively in their own care.

While at The Atlantic Philanthropies, Dr. Langston worked on more than $40 million in new grants, several with ties to Hartford Foundation investments. These included a major award to the National Council on Aging to support a partnership with the Administration on Aging to bring health promotion programs to older adults through community agencies; an extension of the Paul Beeson faculty scholars program to support physician scientists on the island of Ireland; and a capacity building investment in NICHE (Nurses Improving the Care of Hospitalized Elders), a program of the John A. Hartford Foundation Institute for Geriatric Nursing at NYU.

Before joining Atlantic in 2005, Dr. Langston worked for eight years at the Hartford Foundation, rising to Senior Program Officer. At Hartford, he staffed 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 PhD 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.

Copyright 2004 The John A. Hartford Foundation