Our Wisdom Years
Growing Older with Joy, Fulfillment, Resilience, and No Regrets

About Charles Garfield, PhD

Charles Garfield, PhD, is the founder of Shanti, an internationally honored volunteer organization dedicated to the care of the dying, the elderly, and those living with cancer and AIDS; the Shanti National Training Institute, which has taken Shanti's model to organizations around the country and world; and Shanti's newest program that serves older LGBTQ individuals. He has been teaching the skills of serving vulnerable people for more than forty years and is a pioneer in developing service-oriented volunteer organizations in which peers, not professionals, become "the difference between zero and one" for people at the end of life and, more recently, seniors in the LGBTQ community. For his work with Shanti and for originating the Shanti model of peer support, Garfield was named National Activist of the Year-one of America's highest awards to individuals making voluntary contributions in public service. He has also received recognition from cities and organizations large and small, including a Mayor's Day in his honor in San Francisco and many other awards. For more than four decades, as a clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco (UCSF), Dr. Garfield continued his work in the care of dying patients and their families, many of whom were elderly. A fellow of the American Psychological Association, he is currently a research scholar at the Starr King School of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He teaches courses on aging and end of life care at the Metta Institute in San Francisco, where he is a founding faculty member and at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. While on the faculty of the Cancer Research Institute at UCSF, he was one of the early contributors to the burgeoning field of psychosocial oncology. Garfield began his career in computer science after receiving two graduate degrees in mathematics from Adelphi University as well as induction into Pi Mu Epsilon, the National Mathematics Honorary Society, and later, the Adelphi University Alumni Academy of Distinction. He earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He writes for and serves on the editorial board of Greater Good, a national e-magazine from the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Science and the Greater Good.