Treasurer, Board of Directors
Laurinda is a Professor of Gerontology at American River College in Sacramento, California, where she serves as the Gerontology Department Chair and Career Education Program Coordinator, and on ARC Academic Senate. She also serves on the board of the California Council on Gerontology and Geriatrics and on multiple workgroups for the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education, the academic arm of the Gerontological Society of America. She is the 2020 recipient of the Gerontological Society of America’s Rising Star award.
Laurinda was also the project leader and primary author of Ageism First Aid, an online course underwritten in part, by the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education’s Founders Innovation Fund, through a grant from the Retirement Research Foundation (now the RRF Foundation for Aging), and supported by the Gerontological Society of America.
In 2009, Laurinda began her academic studies at Paradise Valley Community College and chose the traditional path toward speech pathology, elementary and special education. Her interdisciplinary bachelor’s at Northern Arizona University was followed by a year of doctoral work at Arizona State University where she researched cross-modal learning/memory during life-relevant versus psychometric assessment. That research sparked Laurinda’s interest in ageism and inspired her to enroll in the gerontology master’s program at the University of Northern Colorado. Her research focused on attitudes about aging labels among people over age 50 who were employed, volunteering, and independently attending programs and activities at the local in the local community.
Prior to shifting to gerontology, Laurinda worked in retail sales and marketing and management in advertising, construction, and manufacturing.