Carol A. Prescott

Carol Prescott, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Gerontology at the University of Southern California. She was raised in Southern California, then moved east to attend Johns Hopkins University, where she earned BA and MA degrees with honors in Experimental Psychology. She headed to the University of Virginia, earning a PhD in Psychology, focusing on Clinical Research with a minor in Quantitative Methods. Additional training positions included research assistant at the Psychogeriatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, clinical psychology intern at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She joined the Psychiatry faculty at VCU School of Medicine and then moved to the Department of Psychology at University of Southern California, from which she retired in 2023.

Dr. Prescott has authored more than 180 journal articles and book chapters. She is coauthor (with K. Kendler) of Genes, Environment and Psychopathology: Understanding the Causes of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders, (Guilford Press, 2006) and (with K. Grimm and J.J. McArdle) of Longitudinal Structural Equation Modeling, Second Ed. (American Psychological Association Press, forthcoming). She was associate editor of two academic journals: Behavior Genetics and Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research and served as a reviewer of empirical research articles for more than 20 other journals. Between 1995 and 2023 she had continuous research funding from the National Institutes of Health and several foundations. Her professional honors include receiving the Dobzhansky Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Behavior Genetics Association and the Theodore Reich Young Investigator Award from the International Society on Psychiatric Genetics.