Nationality Indian, Canadian Name Jagannath Das Children 2 | Spouse(s) Gita Das (m. 1955) Years active 1955–present Role Psychologist | |
 | ||
Born January 20, 1931 ( 1931-01-20 ) Puri, Odisha State, India Occupation Educational Psychologist Books Assessment of Cognitive, The Working Mind: An I, Verbal Conditioning and Beha, Cognitive Planning and Exec, Simultaneous and Successi | ||
Jagannath Prasad Das (often referred to as JP Das ) (born 20 January 1931) is an Indo-Canadian educational psychologist and an internationally recognized expert in educational psychology, intelligence and childhood development. Among his contributions to psychology are the PASS theory of intelligence and the Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System. Das was the Director of the JP Das Developmental Disabilities Centre at the University of Alberta from to. He formally retired in 1996, and is currently Emeritus Director of the Centre on Developmental and Learning Disabilities and Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, was inducted into the Order of Canada and has an Honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Vigo in Spain.
Contents
Biography
JP Das was born in Puri, a city on the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Odisha, India. He is one of six siblings and was educated in Cuttack from grade 2 to the completion of his B.A. degree. He earned a B.A. Honours in Psychology and Philosophy from Utkal University in Cuttack, and then completes a M.A. in Experimental Psychology at Patna University, India.
After two years as a lecturer in Psychology at Utkal University, in 1955 he won a Government of India scholarship to study at the Institute of Psychiatry University of London, supervised by Hans Eysenck. He was much impressed by Eysenck’s penchant for empirical research, and chose for his dissertation an investigation into the relationship between hypnosis, eyelid conditioning and reactive inhibition. After earning his Ph.D. in 1957, he returned to Utkal University where he was a Lecturer in Psychology, and then a Reader in Psychology, for five years. In 1963, he was awarded a Kennedy Foundation Visiting Professorship at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and after a year there, moved on to UCLA where he spent a year as a visiting associate professor in Psychology before returning to Utkal University in 1965.
Das moved to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1968 accepting the position of University Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Mental Retardation that had been established by Donald Ewen Cameron in 1968. He became the third Director of the centre in 1972 and continued to work at the Centre until 1994. He formally retired in 1995, and continues at the Centre as the Emeritus Director and an Emeritus Professor, still conducting research, as well as writing books and articles. The Centre was renamed in his honour in 1997.
Das has written more than 300 research papers and book chapters, as well as published ten books.
Later years
Das is continuing to pursue his work on cognitive processes in typical and atypical populations, particularly on executive functions and speed of processing. The apparent implications of these higher mental activities on education as well as management is the topic of a new book Cognitive Planning and Executive Functions (JP Das & S.B. Misra, 2014). His other book this year curiously is on Consciousness Quest where East meets the West (Das, 2014).
Order of Canada
Das received the Order of Canada, the highest honour that Canada can confer on its citizen, on 1 July 2015 for his internationally recognized work in the field of cognitive psychology, notably in the development of one of the first "brain-based" theory of intelligence. The theory led to the co-development of the Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System, now used as an alternative to the traditional IQ test.
Honours and awards
In 2015, Das was named to the Order of Canada. In addition, he has received:
In recognition of his work, Timothy Papadopoulos, Rauno Parilla and John Kirby edited Cognition, Intelligence & Achievement: A Tribute to J.P. Das is in press, to be published in 2015. [New York: Elsevier/Academic Press, 2015. ISBN 9780124104440). The 21 chapters in the book review current research related to his work on the cognitive processes underlying intelligence and achievement, and the application of the work to clinical assessment and intervention. The book includes a foreword written by Robert J. Sternberg.