Gottfredson honored with Mensa Press Award

Linda S. Gottfredson was presented with the 2006 Mensa Press Award for her article "Schools and the g Factor," published in summer 2004 in The Wilson Quarterly.

Dr. Gottfredson is a professor at the University of Delaware whose work has appeared in the Mensa Research Journal. She donated her prize of $1,000 to a fund set up at Johns Hopkins University in memory of Dr. Julian Stanley, a scholar who made significant contributions to the study of gifted youth and 2000 winner of the Mensa Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Together with Robert Gordon, Dr. Gottfredson established the sociology of intelligence, a field that examines how the wide dispersion in intelligence within all human populations creates sociopolitical dilemmas for free nations and shapes or constrains the work, school and other institutions that cultures evolve over time. Most of her research has focused on individual differences in vocational interests and mental abilities, with particular emphasis on how they affect individuals' life chances. She also works to get allied disciplines (personnel selection; vocational counseling; school, health and evolutionary psychology) to take individual differences in intelligence seriously by showing how that can provide new insight into old problems.

Dr. Gottfredson is a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. She is on the editorial board of several journals, including Intelligence, and her articles have also frequently appeared in publications for general audiences.

The Mensa Press Award is designed to encourage reporters and editors to spread the latest news about intelligence to lay audiences. Articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines for up to two years prior to the submission date are eligible. Applicants need not be members of Mensa to win.