Linda Susanne Gottfredson (née Howarth; born 1947) is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994). She is on the boards of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, the International Society for Intelligence Research, and the editorial boards of the academic journals Intelligence, Learning and Individual Differences, and Society. Life and education Gottfredson was born in San Francisco in 1947. She is a third generation university faculty member. Her father, Jack A. Howarth (died 2006), was a faculty member at U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, as was his father. Gottfredson initially majored in biology, but later transferred to psychology with her first husband, Gary Don Gottfredson. In 1969, she received a bachelor's degree in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. She worked in the Peace Corps in Malaysia. Gottfredson and her husband went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977. Academic work Gottfredson took a position at Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools and investigated issues of occupational segregation and typology based on skill sets and intellectual capacity. She married Robert A. Gordon, who worked in a related area at Hopkins, and they divorced by the mid-1990s. In 1985, Gottfredson participated in a conference called "The g Factor in Employment Testing". The papers presented were published in the December 1986 issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, which she edited. In 1986, Gottfredson was appointed associate professor of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark. In 1989, The Washington Post reported that one of Gottfredson's presentations was cited favorably by an article in the National Association for the Advancement of White People's magazine. That year, she presented a series of papers on general intelligence factor and employment, including some criticizing the use of different curves for candidates of different races. Gottfredson has said: While an assistant professor of Educational Studies in the late 1980s, Gottfredson applied for and received three grants from the Pioneer Fund, which was created to advocate research into eugenics. She was promoted to