James C. Sharf

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James C. "Jim" Sharf is an American psychologist and expert witness who specializes in employment and human resources. He helps develop, implement and defend employment selection and performance appraisal procedures that minimize the risk of employment litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Sharf earned his B.S. in Chemistry, Dickinson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from University of Tennessee in 1970. He was Chief Psychologist at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the mid-1970s, where he drafted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. He later served as Special Assistant to EEOCs Chairman for whom he drafted the race norming prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. He has successfully defended validity generalization (VG) in lower courts - his VG reasoning having been affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

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 defended the findings on race and intelligence in The Bell Curve. ^[1]

In 2006, he was awarded the M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) for developing the valid, legally defensible employment tests used by the Transportation Security Administration to hire fifty-thousand airport security screeners nationwide in 2002. Sharf is a Fellow of both the SIOP and the American Psychological Association.