Anne Anastasi: A Brief Biography

Anne Anastasi was born in New York City in 1908 to first generation immigrants. She was raised by her mother and grandmother after the unfortunate death of her father. Anne entered college at 15 and graduated with a doctorate at 21 from Columbia University, excelling despite the social-cultural difficulties of being a second generation immigrant. She also faced the difficulties of finding a job as a female psychologist during an economic crash. Anne’s first job was as an instructor at her undergraduate college, Barnard University, and despite the economic hardships she was able to begin research though government work programs that provided research assistants. Then in 1939 she accepted the position as psychology department chair at Queens

University, a position she held for eight years despite a lack of support from the administrators. Following her position as department chair, she worked at Fordham University until her retirement 32 years later.
Throughout Anne’s career as an educator she maintained her research and writings, including: Differential Psychology, Fields of Applied Psychology, and Psychological testing. These books display a wide variety of topics; one of the many reasons that Anne is famous is for her contributions to the field across so many different specialties. For these contributions she received awards for Applications of Psychology, Education Testing Service to Measurement, Contributions to Research in Education, and the Gold Medal for Life achievement. Due to her achievements in psychology she was the APA president in 1972 and was the first women in fifty years to hold that title. In 1987 she was the first psychologist to receive the US National Medal of Science in Psychology.
The dedication to psychology required to be able to achieve so much, can be traced back to Anne’s’ diagnosis of ovarian cancer; the treatment left her infertile and according to her allowed her to focus on her career. Her students would be referred to as her students as her children instead and these children would come to include people from all over the world who would come to hear her lectures. Anne Anastasi died in 2001, known internationally and loved by her students, leaving behind the Anne Anastasi foundation to support future generations of psychologists and an award in her honor: the Anne Anastasi Award for outstanding graduate students.