William Damon (born 1944 in Brockton, Massachusetts) is a psychologist who is a professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is one of the world's leading scholars of human development. Damon has done pioneering research on the development of purpose in life and wrote the influential book The Path to Purpose. Damon has helped design innovative developmental methods such as peer learning. Damon also is known for his studies of effective philanthropy. His current work includes a study exploring purpose in higher education and a study of family purpose across generations. Dr. Damon writes on intellectual and social development through the lifespan. Damon has been elected to the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been designated one of the fifty most influential living psychologists in the world today. Early life and education Damon grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts and attended public schools there. His mother Helen was a shoe designer. His father Philip served in the army during World War II and did not return from the war. Damon moved in with his mother's uncle Louis Meyers, who helped raise him and sent him to college. He attended Phillips Academy Andover for high school. After college, Damon received a doctorate in psychology at the University of California. He then joined the psychology faculty at Clark University as an assistant professor. In the 1990s he was University Professor at Brown University, where he founded the Center for the Study of Human Development. Research and writing career Damon is the author of 20 books and numerous book chapters and articles on psychology and human development. His work has been influential for research and theory in academic developmental psychology. Damon’s editorship of the 5th and 6th editions of the Handbook of Child Psychology places him–along with Carl Murchison, Leonard Carmichael, and Paul Mussen–as one of the great organizers and synthesizers of developmental science. As part of Damon’s commitment to the study of human growth, he also was the founder and long-term editor of the series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. By the time Damon captured the attention of the popular press with his book The Moral Child: Nurturing Children’s Natural Moral Growth (1990), he had written and edited seven scholarly books on the social and moral development of children. His early works include The Social World of