Paul Meehl

Paul Everett Meehl (3 January 1920 to 14 February 2003) was an American clinical psychologist, born in Minneapolis, who spent his whole career on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where he became Hathaway and Regents' Professor of Psychology and later a past president of the American Psychological Association. He took his bachelor's degree in 1941 and his PhD in psychology in 1945 under Starke R. Hathaway. He chaired the Minnesota psychology department at 31, received the American Psychological Association award for distinguished scientific contributions at 38, became its president at 42, was made Regents' professor in 1968 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. A 2002 survey ranked him the 74th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. His contributions span construct validity, the etiology of schizophrenia, psychological assessment, behavioral prediction, metascience and the philosophy of science, and with Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars he founded the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science.