Jay Belsky

I grew up outside of NYC, spending lots of time working with my two brothers in our family's luncheonette in Manhattan's garment center. For reasons I never understood, at a very early age I set my eyes on attending West Point, the US Military Academy, even though it wasn't a career as a soldier that interested me; it was a patriotic ambition. But once admitted, I decided instead to attend Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. But when that proved insufficiently interesting, I found myself in an identity crisis: Who was I? What was I to become? By sheer luck, I was steered to volunteer at the university hospital day care center--which changed my life. I decided I wanted to be a nursery-school teacher--to light a candle rather than curse the darkness--and transferred to Vassar College because it had a nursery school on campus. The study of psychology there led me to pursue a Ph.D. in human development at Cornell, which then led to my first job at Penn State university where I studied, as I did throughout my career, the effects of childhood experience on future development. After 21 years there--and having raised two sons to manhood (one who has produced 2 grandchildren)--I moved to London to another academic job. A dozen years there led to another dozen at the University of California, Davis and an endowed chair before retiring in 2020. I now reside in northern California, right on the rocky coast facing the Pacific Ocean. Can't complain!