Nancy Bayley

Nancy Bayley was an American psychologist best known for her work on the Berkeley Growth Study and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development that grew out of it. After earning her PhD at the University of Iowa in 1926, she joined the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, where she began the long-running Berkeley Growth Study tracking children's physical and behavioral development, and went on to examine the development of cognitive and motor function in children, work that led her to conclude that intelligence itself evolves over the course of development. She was the first woman to receive the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution award.