Background
Plomin, Robert was born on February 20, 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Joseph and Garnette Plomin.
Plomin, Robert was born on February 20, 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Joseph and Garnette Plomin.
Plomin earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from DePaul University in 1970 and a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology in 1974 from the University of Texas at Austin under personality psychologist Arnold Buss.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He then worked at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1986 until 1994 he worked at Pennsylvania State University, studying elderly twins reared apart and twins reared together to study aging and is currently at the Institute of Psychiatry (King"s College London).
He has been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, which in 2002 awarded him the Dobzhansky Memorial Award for a Lifetime of Outstanding Scholarship in Behavior Genetics.
Plomin was ranked among the 100 most eminent psychologists in the history of science. Plomin has shown the importance of non-shared environment, a term that he coined to refer to the environmental reasons why children growing up in the same family are so different.
In addition, he has shown that many environmental measures in psychology show genetic influence and that genetic factors can mediate associations between environmental measures and developmental outcomes. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.
His most recent books are Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era (Washington, District of Columbia: APA Books, 2003) and Behavioral Genetics (6th edition, New York: Worth Publishers, 2012).
Fellow: American Psychological Association.
Married Judith Dunn; children: Benjamin Hadary, Joseph.