Talk:Paul Baltes
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PAUL BALTES 1939-CURRENT
Paul B. Baltes, born in 1939 in Saarlouis, Germany, is director of the Center of Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, and professor of psychology at the Free University of Berlin. He received his doctorate from the University of Saarland (Saarbrücken, Germany) in 1967. Ernst E. Boesch, the cultural psychologist and one of Piaget's students, was his mentor.
Baltes spent 15 years as professor of psychology and human development at several American Institutions and as a multiple fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1977-78, 1990-91, 1997-98).
Baltes is best known for his contributions to (a) creating the field of lifespan psychology, (b) the psychological study of wisdom, (c) research on cognitive aging and the plasticity of the aging mind, (d) social scenarios concerning the future of old age and an aging society, and (e) the articulation and testing of models of successful development and aging. Together with his late wife, Margret Baltes, he proposed a theory of successful development that characterizes adaptive lifespan development as the orchestration of three processes: selection, optimization, and compensation.
Another signature of Baltes' career are his many roles in interdisciplinary organizations and science policy. For instance, he is active in the US Social Science Research Council (from 1996 until 2000 he was chair of its Board of Directors), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Science, and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (where he serves as Vice-President since 2000). Regrading interdisciplinary work, Baltes is engaged primarily in two projects: Together with Karl Ulrich Mayer he directs the Berlin Aging Study and, together with the sociologist N. Smelser, he is co-editor-in-chief of the 26-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Elsevier) which is scheduled to appear in 2001.
Baltes is author or editor of 15 books and more than 250 scholarly articles and chapters. For his work, Baltes has been honored with numerous awards, including honorary doctorates (Jyväskylä, Stockholm, Geneva) and election as foreign member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Among the awards are the International Psychology Award of the American Psychological Association (1995), the Kleemeier Award of the Gerontological Society of America (1991), the German Psychology Award (1994), the Aristotle Prize of the European Federation of Psychological Association (1997), the Novartis Prize of the International Association of Gerontology (1999), and in 2000 jointly with M. Baltes, the Longevity Prize of the IPSEN Foundation. In 2000, Baltes was elected to the Order Pour le mérite of the Sciences and the Arts.
This man is mentioned repeatedly in my psychology textbooks, and is multiply credited (above) with several theory developments, including theories of aging, wisdom, and lifespan development. When/if someone else has the time to expand, the above bio. is a good starter.→ R Young {yakłtalk} 07:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
