David Wechsler

David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist, born in Lespezi, Romania in 1896 and died in 1981, who developed the best known intelligence scales, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). He was born into a Jewish family and emigrated with his parents to the United States as a child, then studied at the City College of New York and Columbia University, earning his master's degree in 1917 and his doctorate in 1925 under the direction of Robert S. Woodworth. During the First World War he worked with the United States Army on psychological tests to screen new draftees. From 1932 until 1967 he was chief psychologist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where he created his tests, and he argued that factors other than intellectual ability are involved in intelligent behavior.