We are proud to salute the Gerontological Society of America and its 65th Annual Meeting. If you try to call us in New York this week you will find that more than half of our staff are at the conference in San Diego—meeting with experts, participating in Hartford Foundation-sponsored events, attending sessions, and catching up with grantees.

GSA itself is one of the Foundation’s longest standing and largest grantees, hosting our social work faculty scholars and doctoral fellows programs and, as of this year, serving as the coordinating center for our geriatric nursing initiative. We are grateful to the leadership and staff of GSA for their partnership.

I want to particularly call out a few of the outstanding Hartford grantees being honored at the meeting:

We are very excited that Beeson Scholar and Associate Professor of Geriatrics at Rush Medical College, XinQi Dong, MD, MPH, will be giving his Maxwell A. Pollack Award for Productive Aging Lecture—“Elder Abuse: Research, Advocacy and Health Policy.” This year’s Pollack winner is another grantee and long-time friend of the Foundation, Mary Naylor, PhD, RN, FAAN, of the University of Pennsylvania, a Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence. The Pollack award is sponsored by our good friends in New York at the New York Community Trust.

Thomas M. Gill, MD, another Beeson Scholar and a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and investigative medicine and the Humana Foundation Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, a Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine, is the 2012 recipient of the Joseph T. Freeman Award. His lecture will be something to look forward to in 2013.

Cornelia Beck, PhD, RN, FAAN, of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) is the 2012 recipient of the M. Powell Lawton Award. Beck holds the Louise Hearn Chair in Dementia and Long-term Care Research in the Department of Geriatrics within the College of Medicine, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, the College of Nursing, and the College of Public Health. She is the co-director of the UAMS Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence and one of the co-directors of the Foundation’s Geropsych Nursing Collaborative.

Ann Kolanowski, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Elouise Ross Eberly Professor of Nursing in the School of Nursing at the Pennsylvania State University, has won the 2012 Doris Schwartz Gerontological Nursing Research Award. Kolanowski is also a professor of psychiatry in the College of Medicine and directs the Foundation-funded Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence. The award honors her outstanding and sustained contribution to geriatric nursing research.

We look forward to learning from the expertise of these award recipients and the other 4,000 conference goers. To help take their knowledge about aging issues to the public, GSA will once again have journalists attending the meeting as part of a fellowship program supported by the MetLife Foundation.

We are pleased to join as a partner this year by sponsoring the John A. Hartford/MetLife Foundation Journalism in Aging & Health Fellow, who will report on topics specifically related to the health and health care of older Americans. Barbara Peters Smith, a well-respected reporter from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, was selected as this year’s fellow and she will report not only about the GSA meeting, but on topics related to home care issues throughout the year.

Finally, I want to recognize GSA’s president and soon-to-be board chair, Nancy Whitelaw, PhD, a long-time Foundation grantee and my particular friend. Nancy led sites in the Foundation’s Generalist Physician and Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training programs while at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. Since moving to the National Council on Aging, she has led or co-led the development of evidence-based health promotion programs at NCOA’s Center for Healthy Aging in collaboration with the Administration on Aging/Administration for Community Living, as well as the Practice Change Fellows/Practice Change Leaders programs.

In her honor, we were very pleased to sponsor GSA’s presidential symposia designed to embody GSA’s interdisciplinary spirit and conference theme Charting New Frontiers in Aging. I hope you will attend and all of the Hartford staff look forward to seeing you.