Ellen Bruce serves as a senior fellow at the Gerontology Institute and was an associate professor in the Gerontology Department, teaching law and public policy courses in the graduate programs. Her primary areas of interest are income security for older adults, pensions and retirement income, older women, and elder law. In 1993, she founded the Pension Action Center, which houses the New England Pension Assistance Project, the Illinois Pension Assistance Project, and the National Pension Lawyers Project, and serves as a base for pension and retirement income research. The center brings together services for participants, retirement income research, and policy work. Bruce's work focuses on participant-related problems, including lost pensions, diminishing plan participation and survivor benefits as well as more general research on income security for older adults including the development of the Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index).