معرفی
Loretta Platts is an Associate Professor in Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University's Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences. She is currently serving as the RJ-CASBS Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University for the 2025-2026 academic year. Her research focuses on older people's working lives, particularly retirement, returns to work from retirement, and having a job while claiming a pension.
Dr. Platts received her educational background from prestigious institutions:
- PhD from Imperial College London
- MA from Sciences Po Paris
- BA from the University of Oxford
Her research is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from public health, gerontology, labor economics, and life course sociology. She takes a cross-national approach, studying high-income countries like the United States and Sweden alongside middle-income countries. Much of her work uses large longitudinal surveys complemented by interview research to uncover underlying mechanisms. A key focus is how public old-age pensions affect older workers' options and experiences in the labor market, with particular attention to how retirement and post-retirement work impact social and health inequalities in old age.
Her extensive publication record demonstrates a consistent focus on understanding the changing nature of work in later life. Her research shows that post-pensionable-age jobs are generally less stressful, freer, and more satisfying than jobs held by younger workers. She has documented how retirement often leads to significant improvements in sleep quality, with reductions in sleep difficulties that can be sustained for up to 11 years. Her cross-national comparative work reveals important variations in unretirement rates and predictors across countries, highlighting that unretirement is more common among those who are already socioeconomically advantaged, potentially deepening financial inequality in later life.
Dr. Platts has secured significant research funding as principal investigator from multiple prestigious sources:
- Swedish Research Council (funding a trans-Atlantic project on labor market participation after pensionable age)
- Forte (funding research on post-retirement work in Sweden)
- Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (funding international research on post-retirement work impacts in Japan, Sweden, and the USA)
- Kamprad Family Foundation (funding research on quality of life related to paid work and retirement)
Her research has gained substantial media attention, with coverage in major outlets including the BBC, Le Monde, Financial Times, and Svenska Dagbladet. She also teaches as course manager and examiner for "Stress, recovery, and health" in the Master's programme in public health sciences.
