Spouse Bijou Yang | ||
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Born June 1, 1942 (age 74)London, England ( 1942-06-01 ) Thesis Suicidal behavior: aggression or hostility in social relationships? (1967) People also search for Carol Tice, Steven Stack, Megan Kimbrell Books How They Started: How 25 G, Serial Killers: The Insatiable, Making sense of suicide, Theories of Personality: A System, The cruelest death | ||
David A. Lester is a British-American psychologist, suicidologist, and a distinguished professor of psychology at Stockton University.
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Education
Lester received his BA from Cambridge University in 1964, and his M.A. from Brandeis University in psychology in 1966. He went on to receive another M.A. from Cambridge University in 1968, and received his first PhD the same year at Brandeis. In 1991, he received his second PhD, this one in social & political science at Cambridge.
Career
Lester served as an assistant professor of psychology at Wellesley College from 1967 to 1969. From 1969-1971, he was Director of Research and Evaluation at the Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service in Buffalo, NY. In 1971, he joined the faculty at Stockton University, which opened that year, as a psychology professor and head of the psychology program, and later became a distinguished professor there in 2008.
Research
Lester is known for researching suicide, and has been called "the world's pre-eminent suicide researcher." As of 2013, he has published 100 books and 2,550 papers on this subject. His research has been published in at least 158 American journals and 47 foreign journals. In a 2010 study, he and Cynthia Yeh of Touro University California found that suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge occurring in 1999 and 2009 tended to involve older people and men more often than suicides that took place there in the 1970s.
Professional activities
Lester was the president for the International Association for Suicide Prevention for 1991-1995. He edited the Proceedings of the American Association of Suicidology from 1988 to 1995, and received their Dublin Award in 1997.
Personal life
Lester is married to Bijou Yang, who was a professor of economics at Drexel University.