Education

• 1990 Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Harvard University
• 1981 M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia, Harvard University
• 1978 A.B., magna cum laude, and with honors in Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
• 1976-1977 Junior Year Abroad, Foreign Students' Division, Tokyo, Japan, Waseda University

Teaching & Research Interests

• Aging among ethnic minority elders
• Cultural awareness in providing services to both culturally mainstream and minority elders
• The influence of sociocultural factors in shaping long-term care housing options and services for elders
• Health, culture and aging
• Eldercare from the perspectives of elders, their families and professional care providers
• Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia
• Rural aging

Profile

Professor Elliott received her doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University. She conducted her doctoral research as a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark, examining the way elders see themselves and how this personal view of aging differs from, and sometimes conflicts with, the way the Danish welfare state views "pensioners" and structures services and institutions for them. She received postdoctoral training in social agingstudies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and in ethno-agingstudies and medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Elliott then spent three years working as a researcher and clinician at the University of California, San Francisco's Memory Clinic and Alzheimer's Center on a project funded by the National Institute on Aging and involving Chinese dementia patients, their families and the Chinese elder-service community in San Francisco's Chinatown. She joined the faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato in 1998.