David Lubinski, 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award winner

Dr. David Lubinski, the co-director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award in July for his work focusing on the identification of different types of intellectually precocious youth and the conditions for enhancing their learning, work performance and creativity.

Dr. Lubinski co-directs SMPY with his wife, Dr. Camilla Person Benbow, who also was honored with the Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Both are protégés of Dr. Julian Stanley, the late professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, the winner of the first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and the man who pioneered the way gifted middle-schoolers are educated. After establishing SMPY in 1971, Dr. Stanley piloted a variety of research-based program models and advocated acceleration, not just enrichment, for gifted students.

Dr. Lubinski has carried on that rich research tradition at Vanderbilt, where he is Professor of Psychology and Human Development and the Investigator with the school’s Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Dr. Lubinksi’s interests are concentrated on psychological measurement and assessing individual differences in human behavior.