The Leading Age research leader helped providers strengthen the workforce, support family caregivers, and enhance service-enriched housing.
After a distinguished 50-year career in aging, Dr. Robyn I. Stone retired in February.
Stone served for 27 years as senior vice president of research at LeadingAge, where she was instrumental in establishing and implementing a cutting-edge research agenda. She also served as co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston, where she led a team of Washington, DC-based researchers focused on bridging research, policy, and practice in aging services.
In 1999, Stone established LeadingAge’s signature research center, the Institute for the Future of Aging Services (later renamed the Center for Applied Research). In 2017, she led efforts to expand LeadingAge’s research capacity by establishing the LTSS Center as a joint venture with the University of Massachusetts Boston. She will serve as a strategic advisor to the center through August 2026.
A Varied Career with a Single Theme
Stone’s career in aging, which began in 1973, did not follow a straight path. Yet she insists it had a consistent underlying theme: an appreciation for and respect of older adults.
“This was true even in my formative years,” she says. “My mother was a single parent, and my grandparents were a major influence on me. My sister and I spent every weekend with them, and they shaped my attitudes toward older adults.”
Those attitudes helped Stone navigate her first job. Fresh out of undergraduate work in urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she interviewed older immigrants and compiled an archive of their stories for an ethnic history museum in Philadelphia.
“When I went into urban studies, I was really looking at neighborhoods and the older adults in them,” she says. “It was always about intergenerational and older-adult challenges.”
A 12-Year Career in Government
After working at a Baltimore nonprofit focused on addressing food insecurity, Stone earned a master’s degree in public administration and policy from the University of Pittsburgh and joined the first cohort of the Presidential Management Intern Program, a federal program established in 1977 to recruit and develop a cadre of future government leaders. She earned a Doctor of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and then launched a 12-year career in the federal government, where she quickly gained a reputation as an expert on policies affecting older adults.
Highlights of those years include a stint on the U.S. Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care, better known as the “Pepper Commission,” after its chair, Senator Claude Pepper (D-FL). Stone led efforts to include long-term care in the commission’s seminal 1990 report, which recommended legislative action designed to ensure that all Americans would have access to health coverage.
During a four-year assignment at the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, Stone began working on what has become one of her signature research areas: family caregiving. She used her access to the first national survey of family caregivers to compile the first nationwide dataset on family caregivers and their challenges. The data were significant, she says, because “people didn’t really know what family caregiving was.”
From 1993 to 1997, Stone held several positions in President Bill Clinton’s administration. She led a workgroup that developed the long-term care provisions of the 1993 Health Security Act for the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform. She also served as the deputy assistant secretary for disability, aging, and long-term care policy from 1993 to 1996 and as the assistant secretary for aging from 1996 to 1997.
“I look back on it as a pretty amazing time,” she says. “There was a lot more bipartisan work on issues. We now have many more older adults, but we don’t have champions like Claude Pepper who are really trying to figure out how best to meet the needs of older Americans. Unfortunately, these issues don’t seem to have the same pizzazz at the federal level anymore.”
From Government Service to LeadingAge
In 1999, Stone accepted an invitation from Len Fishman, then CEO of LeadingAge, to establish an applied research center within LeadingAge.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d still be here 27 years later,” says Stone. “I’m really a thought leader and a bridge builder. So LeadingAge has been a perfect place for me. There have been so many opportunities to work on creative, new projects and collaborate with members; it’s been a great environment. After spending over two decades in policy work, it was so rewarding to work in an organization where I could observe and help improve aging services practices on the ground. That’s really the reason I’ve stayed.”
In particular, Stone is most proud of her work supporting the direct care workforce, spotlighting the role of family caregivers, and elevating the importance of affordable housing as a platform for coordinating and integrating services and supports.
These and other issues were “not on anybody’s radar screen” when they caught Stone’s attention. She credits LeadingAge and its leaders with giving her research team the flexibility to follow its instincts.
“There were always opportunities to do pretty cool things with our members as natural laboratories,” she says. “It allowed us to always be looking for gaps in the literature and, in particular, to try to fill the gaps members were experiencing firsthand.”
Looking to the Future
Many pressing issues—including financing long-term care, supporting the aging services workforce, meeting the needs of middle-income older adults, and better integrating home-based services into the care continuum—will require thoughtful consideration and research for years to come, says Stone.
“It’s not the nature of these issues to be solved once and for all,” she says. “But we have to keep trying to mitigate them and improve them. I’m proud of the role I’ve played in that process. I have had a wonderful career. But the journey continues.”