Irving Gottesman - Background

Background

Gottesman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930, to Bernard and Virginia Gottesman (née Weitzner), who were Hungarian–Romanian Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Miles Standish Elementary and a public school in Cleveland's Shaker Heights. After leaving school, Gottesman joined the United States Navy, where he was given a scholarship and the rank of midshipman, and was assigned to the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He first specialized in physics but changed to psychology, receiving his B.S. degree in 1953.

Gottesman did his graduate work at the University of Minnesota, which then patterned its clinical psychology program on the Boulder model, which emphasized research theory and clinical practice. He joined the graduate program in 1956 after three years with the Navy, supported by the Korean War G.I. Bill. He began investigating personality traits in identical and fraternal twins who had filled out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). His Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Psychological Monographs, was rejected before a review on the grounds that the nature–nurture issue it addressed had already been settled in favor of nurture. On appeal, the thesis was reviewed and accepted for publication.

Gottesman began his career at Harvard University as a social relations and psychology lecturer. This non-tenure-track position ended after three years. Then he worked with researcher James Shields at the Maudsley–Bethlem hospital complex in London, using its twin registry to analyze traits of identical and fraternal twins at the lab of Eliot Slater, whom Gottesman met in Rome at the Second International Congress on Human Genetics in 1961. After his return to the University of Minnesota in 1966, Gottesman created a program on behavioral genetics, the first in the U.S. In 1972–1973 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to work with K.O. Christiansen in Denmark. In 1980 he left to join the Washington University School of Medicine, then moved to the University of Virginia in 1985, where he started the clinical psychology training program. Gottesman continued vising London and collaborating with Shields, with whom he co-wrote a series of books.After spending 16 years at the University of Virginia, Gottesman retired from an active role after 41 years of research, but continues research part-time in psychology and psychiatry.

As of 2011, Gottesman is a professor with an endowed chair in adult psychiatry and a senior fellow in psychology at the University of Minnesota; a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Academy of Clinical Psychology, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; a Guggenheim Fellow for 1972–1973 at the University of Copenhagen; an emeritus in psychology with a chair endowment at the University of Virginia; and an honorary fellow at the London Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has advised 35 graduate students, and an annual lecture on behavior and neurogenetics has been established in his name by the University of Virginia. Gottesman is married to Carol Applen, whom he wed on December 23, 1970, and has two sons.