Catharine Cox Miles

Catharine Morris Cox Miles (1890 to 1984) was an American psychologist known for her work on intelligence and genius. Born in San Jose, California, she took a bachelor's degree at Stanford University, worked on relief efforts in Germany with the American Friends Service Committee after the First World War, and then completed a Ph.D. at Stanford in 1925 under Lewis Terman. Her dissertation, Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses, published in 1926 as the second volume of the Genetic Studies of Genius series, was one of the earliest attempts to apply social scientific methods to the study of greatness: it used biographical sources to estimate childhood IQ scores for eminent people who lived before IQ testing. With Terman she wrote Sex and Personality, built on a masculinity-femininity scale, and from 1932 until she retired in 1953 she was a professor and lead clinical psychologist at Yale.