Randy Engle was interviewed by David Lubinski at the 2019 meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Randy earned his bachelor’s degree at West Virginia State College and his PhD in experimental psychology at Ohio State University in 1973. After many years at the University of South Carolina, he became chair of the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995, a post he held for more than a decade and where he remains a professor of psychology today.

His research addresses one of the central questions in the study of the mind: why people differ in working memory, the limited capacity to hold and use information in the moment. Randy has argued that these differences reflect how well a person can control their attention, resisting distraction and keeping goals in mind, and that this capacity for attention control is an important component of general fluid intelligence. His work has made working memory capacity one of the most studied constructs in cognitive psychology and a key bridge between attention, memory, and reasoning.

For a decade he served as editor-in-chief of Current Directions in Psychological Science, and he has been president of the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science and chair of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society. Randy is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and his honors include a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science and the Association for Psychological Science’s Mentor Award, a nod to the many researchers he has trained.