Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D., the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, an honorific society for exceptional leaders. Established by Congress in 1863, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine provide objective advice to policy makers on matters of science, technology, and health.
Moffitt joined Duke in 2009 with her husband and co-author, Avshalom Caspi, as members of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. She retains her appointment at King’s College, London, as a professor of social behaviour and development at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre. In 2004, she was named a fellow of the British Academy.
She is associate director of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study at the University of Otago in New Zealand, a longitudinal study that has followed 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 45, so far. Moffitt and Caspi have been using the Dunedin data to investigate life-long aging processes, intelligence, gene-environment interactions, family history, the natural history of mental disorders, abnormal behavior and criminology. Moffitt has twice been named to the Web of Science’s most highly cited authors list.