Matt McGue was interviewed by David Lubinski at the 2022 meeting in Vienna, Austria. Born in Oakland, California, Matt earned his psychology degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 and his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1981, where he studied under Thomas Bouchard. After four years at the Washington University School of Medicine he returned to Minnesota, becoming a full professor in 1992 and, today, a Regents Professor of psychology.

A behavioral geneticist, Matt has spent his career using twins, siblings, and adoptees to disentangle the roles of nature and nurture in human development. He was a co-author of the landmark 1990 report from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, one of the most widely cited twin studies ever conducted, which found that roughly 70% of the variance in IQ was associated with genetic differences. At the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research, which he co-directs, he has built and sustained a series of long-running longitudinal studies, among them the Minnesota Twin Family Study, the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study, and studies of adoptive families.

His more recent work follows two threads: how substance use disorders develop from adolescence into adulthood, and the genetic contributions to aging and longevity, the latter pursued as a guest professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Matt has published more than 400 papers and chapters, served as president of both the Behavior Genetics Association and the International Society for Twin Studies, and received his field’s highest honors, among them the Dobzhansky Award for a lifetime of contributions to behavioral genetics. In 2024 he would go on to receive ISIR’s own Lifetime Achievement Award.