Peter Salovey

Early life

Salovey was born in 1958 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the oldest child of Elaine Salovey, a registered nurse, and Ronald Salovey, a physical chemist and Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California. His paternal grandparents came from Warsaw by way of Jerusalem; they met on a ship crossing the Atlantic.

Salovey spent his early years in northern New Jersey and attended high school at Williamsville North High School in a suburb of Buffalo, New York before moving to suburban Los Angeles in 1975, when his father was appointed a professor at the University of Southern California. In 1976, he graduated co-valedictorian from Rolling Hills High School in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. He attended Stanford University, where he received an A.B. in psychology and an A.M. in sociology with departmental honors and university distinction. While at Stanford, he served as a peer counselor with The Bridge Peer Counseling Center, a field about which he later co-authored a seminal textbook.

Academic biography

After graduating from Stanford, Salovey moved to New Haven, Connecticut to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale under the guidance of Judith Rodin. After completing a dissertation entitled "The Effects of Mood and Focus of Attention on Self-Relevant Thoughts and Helping Intention," he graduated from Yale in 1986 and joined the Yale Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. He was appointed full professor in 1995 and now has secondary faculty appointments in Yale's School of Management, School of Public Health and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is currently the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology.

Salovey's most significant research contributions are in the field of emotional intelligence. With John D. Mayer he significantly expanded the scope of the concept and authored several of the field's seminal papers, arguing that people have widely ranging abilities pertaining to emotional control, reasoning, and perceptivity. Against earlier theories of intelligence that conceived of emotion as rival to reasoning, Salovey and Mayer contended that emotion could motivate productive outcomes when properly directed. Subsequently, he has worked to develop models and tests of emotional intelligence, such as the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. Salovey's second vein of research is in health psychology, where he has applied social psychology principles to investigate the efficacy of health messaging in promoting HIV risk reduction, early cancer detection, and smoking cessation. In all, Salovey has authored or edited thirteen books translated into eleven languages and published more than 350 journal articles and essays.

Outside Yale, Salovey has served on the National Science Foundation's Social Psychology Advisory Panel, the National Institute of Mental Health Behavioral Science Working Group, and the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council. Salovey served as President of the Society for General Psychology and Treasurer of the International Society for Research on Emotion. He was the founding editor of the Review of General Psychology and an associate editor of Emotion and Psychological Bulletin.

Administrative career

Having serving in various administrative roles within the Department of Psychology for a decade, Salovey was appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in January 2003. The following year he replaced Richard Brodhead as Dean of Yale College. In October 2008, he succeeded Andrew Hamilton as Provost of Yale University. As Provost, Salovey oversaw major budget reductions caused by the 2008 recession, expansion of Yale's West Campus, the formation of Yale–NUS College, reform of tenure policies for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and an overhaul of sexual misconduct grievance procedures.

Speculation that Salovey was being considered for the Yale presidency began nearly four years before President Rick Levin's August 2012 retirement announcement. After a nationwide search in which Salovey was widely considered to be the frontrunner, the Yale Corporation announced his selection as Yale's 23rd president in November 2012. Salovey took office on July 1, 2013.

Salovey is the first Yale president since 1986 to live in the President's House, the formal residence of the university president. After a renovation, Salovey moved into the residence in the fall of 2014.

Honors

In recognition of his research contributions, Salovey has received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the National Cancer Institute CIS Partner in Research Award, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Excellence Award. He has received two awards for excellence in teaching at Yale, the William Clyde Devane Medal and the Lex Hixon '63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences. Other honors include honorary degrees from the University of Pretoria, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harvard University, and National Tsing Hua University as well as membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On May 28, 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University.

Personal life

As a freshman at Stanford, Salovey began listening to bluegrass music and learned to play banjo. In 1990, he founded the Professors of Bluegrass with Kelly Brownell, in which he plays bass. The band has a rotating membership of Yale faculty, students, and residents of New Haven and released its first album, "Pick or Perish," in June 2013. He also serves as a trustee of the International Bluegrass Music Museum and on the advisory board of the Connecticut Folk Festival.

Salovey is married to Marta Moret, a graduate of the Yale School of Public Health and the president of Urban Policy Strategies. They met as students at Yale and married in 1986 in Orange, Connecticut.

The Saloveys are descendants of the Soloveichik rabbinic family. Salovey's brother, Todd, is a director and professor of theater at the University of California, San Diego.