Dr. Scott Bass is Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he holds the academic appointments of Distinguished Professor of Sociology and of Policy Sciences. His responsibilities involve the development and expansion of research and graduate education at this selective, mid-sized, public, research university.
Dr. Bass was formerly a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as director of the University's Gerontology Institute. He was the founding director of the Ph.D. program in gerontology — one of two in the country. He also was a founder of the gerontology certificate program in the College of Public and Community Service, a model for the training of students who are over 60 years old for careers in aging and social policy, and is widely recognized for his national leadership in gerontology education.
A Gerontological Society of America Fellow, Dr. Bass received the 1985 GSA’s Ollie Randall Symposium Award. At the University of Massachusetts Boston, he was honored with the Distinguished Professional Public Service Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. He was a visiting associate at the Lincoln Gerontology Centre at La Trobe University in Australia in 1989; a distinguished visiting professor at Yokohama City University in Japan in 1994; and was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship to study in Japan in 1994. The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education awarded him a National Master Teacher Award in 1996 and, in 1996–97, selected him for the Clark Tibbitts Award for lifetime contributions to the field of gerontology and geriatric education.
Dr. Bass’s recent written work has focused on the social and economic roles of older people. He is the editor of Older and Active (1995) and coeditor of Challenges of the Third Age: Meaning and Purpose in Later Life (in press), Public Policy and the Old Age Revolution in Japan (1996), International Perspectives on State and Family Support for the Elderly (1994), Achieving a Productive Aging Society (1993), Diversity in Aging (1990), and Retirement Reconsidered (1988). He is also a founding coeditor of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy and has published approximately fifty book chapters and articles and more than thirty monographs or research reports regarding aging policy.
Dr. Bass received a combined doctorate in psychology and education in 1976 from the University of Michigan, from which he also earned an M.A. in clinical psychology and a B.A. in psychology.