NILAM RAM

Stanford University

Professor of Communication and Psychology

Nilam Ram is a Professor in the Departments of Communication and Psychology at Stanford University and a co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Nilam’s research grows out of a history of studying change. After completing his undergraduate study of economics, he worked as a currency trader, frantically tracking and trying to predict the movement of world markets as they jerked up, down, and sideways. Later, he moved on to the study of human movement, kinesiology, and eventually psychological processes – with a specialization in longitudinal research methodology. Generally, Nilam studies how short-term changes (e.g., processes such as learning, information processing, emotion regulation, etc.) develop across the lifespan, and how longitudinal study designs contribute to generation of new knowledge. Current projects include examinations of age-related change in children’s self- and emotion-regulation; patterns in minute-to-minute and day-to-day progression of adolescents’ and adults’ emotions; and change in contextual influences on well-being during old age.