ISIR’s 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Earl B. Hunt. Professor Hunt was best known for his research on the implications of individual differences in intelligence in a high-technology society. During his long and productive career, he held professorships at Yale, UCLA, University of Sydney and the University of Washington, where he spent the majority of his career and where he co-founded the computer science department. His book Will We be Smart Enough? A Cognitive Analysis of the Coming Workforce, which described demographic projections and psychometric research as they relate to predictions of possible future workplaces, received the American Psychological Association’s William James book award. His textbook Human Intelligence is widely considered one of the best on the topic.

Professor Hunt believed that the crucial role of a scientist is “to describe the world as it is even if it is not always how we might want it to be, for that is the only way to truly understand and improve the world around us.” The field of intelligence research lost Buz Hunt in 2016.