Jill Quadagno is Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, where she holds the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Gerontology. She has been teaching courses on aging for nearly 30 years. She received her BA from Pennsylvania State University in 1964, her MA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966, and her PhD from the University of Kansas in 1976. She also received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to do research at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in Cambridge, England, in 1979.

In 1992 she received the University Teaching Award from Florida State University and became a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. She has also been the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Section on Aging of the American Sociological Association and has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. In 1994 she served as Senior Policy Advisor on the President's Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform. She is the author or co-author of 12 books on aging and social policy issues, including The Transformation of Old Age Security, Social Bonds in Later Life: States, Labor Markets and the Future of Old Age Policy, From Nursing Homes to Home Care, Ending a Career in the Auto Industry: 30 and Out, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty and One Nation, uninsured: why the U.S. has no National Health Insurance. She served as President of the American Sociological Association from 1997 to 1998.