Her research emphasizes Active Life Expectancy, health behaviors, and health disparities. She developed a new method to calculate active life expectancy, or the percentage of remaining life that older people can expect to live with and without substantial disability. This method allows researchers to make better use of longitudinal data to improve projections of life expectancy and active life expectancy and is used by researchers in many countries. Dr. Laditka received a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.B.A. (Finance) from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, and an M.A. (Economics) and Ph.D. (Public Administration) from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.