Rate My Professor Jeffrey Burr

Jeffrey Burr is Professor Emeritus of Gerontology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he currently serves as adjunct faculty in the Department of Gerontology within the Manning College of Nursing and Health Sciences. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining UMass Boston, Burr was faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1999, he arrived at UMass Boston as director of the gerontology graduate program. Throughout his 26-year tenure, he held prominent administrative roles, including many years as chair of the Department of Gerontology and three years as associate dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, one of whose founding programs was gerontology. A fellow of the Gerontology Institute, Burr retired in 2025 after a distinguished career marked by teaching, research administration, and leadership.

Burr's research specializes in the social demography of aging, including household composition and living arrangements, race and ethnicity in aging populations, labor force participation and retirement, productive activity in later life, disability and aging, aging and health, social determinants of health for older adults, and mental health issues among the elderly. His interests also encompass comparative aging studies, particularly in China, informed by participation in international conferences such as one on aging in Beijing. He has authored nearly 130 peer-reviewed publications and obtained external funding from the National Institute on Aging, the Administration on Aging, and the National Science Foundation. For more than a decade, Burr served as editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Research on Aging, significantly influencing gerontological scholarship. His commitment to mentorship is evident in chairing 30 doctoral dissertation committees and serving on 30 more at UMass Boston—representing half of the 120 dissertations completed since the PhD program's founding—while co-authoring over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and nearly 60 professional conference presentations with graduate students.