Sandra Wood Scarr (August 8, 1936 – October 8, 2021) was an American psychologist and writer. She was the first female full professor in psychology in the history of Yale University. She established core resources for the study of development, including the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the Minnesota Adolescent Adoption Study. She served as president of multiple societies including the Association for Psychological Science and was honoured with multiple awards including the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award. She was also active in the development of commercial childcare. Her work with twins in the 1960s revealed strong genetic influences on intellectual development. One of her key findings was that this differed with race and socioeconomic status (SES), with poor and non-white children showing less genetic influence on their IQ and more environmental influence. She demonstrated a successful intervention in premature infants, showing that stimulation improved their health and developmental outcomes. At Minnesota, she and Richard A. Weinberg found that black and interracial children adopted early into white homes initially had outcomes more similar to the white average, suggesting a role of family environment early in life. By their teens, adoptees with two black birth parents achieved lower scores than did adoptees with one or no black birth parents, suggesting a genetic component to race differences in IQ. Along with the Scarr-Rowe effect of socio-economic status on the heritability of intelligence, another key intellectual landmark established by Scarr was that "Rather than the home environment having a cumulative impact across development, its influence wanes from early childhood to adolescence." She sought also to advance scientific psychology, and in 1991 co-founded Current Directions In Psychological Science. She retired to Hawaii. Biography Scarr was the child of school teacher Jane Powell Wood and John Ruxton Wood, a US Army physician, who in 1942 was appointed director of Army Research Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal and who in 1950 headed the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Scarr spent most of her childhood in the Chesapeake Bay area and went to the Bryn Mawr School for Girls and the National Cathedral School. After completing her undergraduate studies at Vassar College in 1958, where she was involved in undergraduate research with Harriet Zuckerman, Scarr worked for a couple of years first at a family and child service and then at National Institute of Mental Health as a research assistant. In 1960 she enrolled at Harvard University,