Paul Baltes

Paul B. Baltes (1939 to 2006) was a German developmental psychologist who studied life-span development and aging. Born in Saarlouis, he took his doctorate at the University of Saarbrucken in 1967, spent twelve years at American institutions as a professor of psychology and human development, and returned to Germany in 1980 to direct the Center of Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He is credited with theories of life-span development, successful aging and wisdom, including the selective optimization with compensation theory, which he proposed with his wife Margret Baltes. At the Max Planck Institute he founded the Berlin Wisdom Project, chaired the Berlin Aging Study with Karl Ulrich Mayer, and co-edited the 26-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. He died in Berlin of pancreatic cancer in 2006.