The 2006 awardee of ISIR’s Lifetime Achievement Award was Professor Arthur Jensen.

Art Jensen was professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of over 400 scientific papers and half a dozen books, he was best known for his research in psychometrics, educational psychology and academic achievement, mental chronometry, and the role of genetics in human behavior. He sat on the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.

The field of intelligence research lost Arthur Jensen in 2012. In his obituary, James Flynn best summed up his contributions:

“The question now is how to fill the void Jensen’s death leaves, particularly for scholars open to scientific inquiry who challenge some of his conclusions. There is no substitute for someone of great intellectual caliber who disagrees with you. With Jensen no longer alive, we will have to invent him. But we cannot really do that, because no one is so constructed as to put the same energy and imagination into a fictitious opponent as we put into polishing our own ideas. No one can pretend to believe what they do not believe, but I hope there is a young scholar out there with the convictions and mind of Arthur Jensen. I am sometimes asked why I spoke so well of him. The answer is that it was easy.”