Matilda White Riley

Matilda White Riley (April 19, 1911 – November 14, 2004) was an American gerontologist who began working at Rutgers University as a research specialist before becoming a professor from 1950 to 1973. Here she wrote a textbook and discovered her interest in aging. In 1973, Riley became the first woman full professor at Bowdoin College, where she worked until 1981. She spent much of her career as a sociologist specializing in aging at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Riley worked with the Russell Sage Foundation from 1974 to 1977 where she wrote works on the age-stratification paradigm and aging society perspective. In 1931, she earned her bachelor's (and later her master's degree) from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later that same year, she and John married. They were married for sixty-nine years until John's death in 2002. Together, the couple had two children, John W. Riley III and Lucy Sallick. Riley and her husband often worked side by side, recurrently co-authoring papers together. Their first joint scientific paper was published in the 1930s and concerned contraceptive behavior. Along with her father, Riley established the Market Research Company of America from 1939 to 1949. Later she began a career in the Sociology of Aging at Rutgers University in New Jersey and then at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Riley continued her work through her later years, she began focusing on age segregation and solutions to attain age integration.

Awards, honors, and distinctions Executive director of American Sociological Association (1949–1960) Associate director for behavioral and social research at the National Institute of Aging (1979–1991) Distinguished Scholar Award (1988) Social scientist emeritus at the NIH (1998)