SPEAKER: Jennifer Molinsky, Director of the Housing an Aging Society, Harvard University

Jennifer Molinsky, Director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University and a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Design, leads research exploring the housing challenges facing an aging population, including affordability, accessibility and safety in the home, community livability, and connections between housing, services, and health.  Lead author on the Center’s report series, Housing America’s Older Adults, Dr. Molinsky writes and speaks frequently about the role of housing in wellbeing in older age. Jennifer was also a co-editor of the 2018 book A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality and the 2014 book Homeownership Built to Last: Balancing Access, Affordability, and Risk After the Housing Crisis.

Jennifer is a member of the Advisory Board of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging and the Board of Directors of Hearth, Inc., which focuses on homelessness among older adults in the Boston area. She also serves on the steering committee for The Chan School of Public Health Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard and co-directs the Healthy Places Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the Center, she was Chief Planner for Long Range Planning in Newton, MA, and held positions with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Municipal Art Society of New York, Abt Associates, and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ government housing finance practice.  She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT, a Masters of Public Affairs-Urban and Regional Planning from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and a BA from Yale.