Louise Aronson

Dr. Louise Aronson is a geriatrician and founder of the optimizing aging practice at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health, where she cares for older adults.

Aronson's research interests include geriatrics education, reflective learning (which in medicine emphasizes learning from experience to improve care), health advocacy and medical writing for the public.

Aronson earned her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. At UCSF, she completed a residency in internal medicine as well as a clinician-educator fellowship and a geriatrics fellowship. She later earned a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing at Warren Wilson College.

Aronson teaches at UCSF and serves as director of UCSF's programs in health humanities and social advocacy She has received numerous accolades, including the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Professorship for Humanism in Medicine and the American Geriatrics Society's Outstanding Mid-Career Clinician Educator of the Year Award. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life. Her writing credits include the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, JAMA, Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, and she has been featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "Morning Edition," CNBC, "TODAY," "CBS This Morning," Politico, Kaiser Health News and "Tech Nation," and in the New Yorker.