Judith L. Gibbons

Judith Gibbons received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1976 and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships in neuroscience at two New York medical schools, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. During the first 10 years of her professional career, she studied the biology of aggressive behavior, in particular, the roles of neurotransmitters, hormones, and neural systems.

In 1979, Dr. Gibbons went to Saint Louis University as assistant professor of psychology, and in 1981, with another faculty member, founded the University's Women's Studies program. In 1982 she was promoted to Associate Professor and in 1990 to Full Professor. For twenty years she has been researching the values, gender roles, and views of the future among adolescents of different nationalities. Her book, The Thoughts of Youth (Gibbons & Stiles, 2004) described the results of a research project involving 8000 adolescents from 20 different countries. Among those countries was Guatemala, one of the poorest countries of the Americas. During stays in Guatemala, she has studied the development of young adolescents' ideals and hopes for the future, ethnic prejudice, and eating disorders. Because of Guatemala’s role as a prominent sending country for international adoption, she initiated a series of studies on attitudes toward adoption in Guatemala and alternatives to international adoption. She is an editor of a forthcoming book on intercountry adoption to be published by Ashgate in 2012. Dr. Gibbons teaches a course in cross-cultural developmental psychology that addresses human development in cross-cultural perspective. In 1992 she won the Nancy McNeir Ring Award for outstanding teaching at Saint Louis University and the Missouri Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in Higher Education. She has served as the president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and is currently president-elect of the Interamerican Society of Psychology, better known by its Spanish acronym, SIP. She is a fellow of Divisions 2, 35, and 52 of the American Psychological Association and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. During 2011-2012 she will be teaching and doing research at the Universidad del Valle Guatemala as a Fulbright Scholar.