Terrie Moffitt was interviewed by David Lubinski at the 2026 meeting in Warsaw, Poland. Terrie is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and Professor of Social Development at King’s College London. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Southern California in 1984.

Her work uses long-term longitudinal studies to understand how mental health and behavior develop across the lifespan. Her influential developmental taxonomy distinguished “life-course-persistent” antisocial behavior, which begins in childhood and endures, from “adolescence-limited” behavior that emerges and fades with the teenage years. With her longtime collaborator and partner Avshalom Caspi, Terrie published a pair of landmark studies in Science in the early 2000s showing how particular genes shape people’s sensitivity to their environments: one linked a variant of the MAOA gene to antisocial behavior following childhood maltreatment, and the other linked a serotonin-transporter variant to depression following stressful life events.

She is associate director of the Dunedin Study, which has followed a 1972 birth cohort in New Zealand across their lives, and she co-founded the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Study of a 1994 cohort of British twins. Her more recent work, which she brought to Warsaw, asks whether we can measure how fast a person is aging while they are still healthy, and what cognitive health reveals about that pace. Terrie has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy, and in 2024 she received the honour of Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from King Charles III.

The recording of Terrie’s Distinguished Contributor Interview will be posted here soon.