Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth has dedicated her career to empowering and equipping students with skills to reach their full potential. Duckworth began her career in management consulting, followed by years as a K-12 educator, before shifting her focus to psychology, using the rigor of the scientific process to bridge research and practice in the overlapping fields of psychology and education. Her scholarly impact across these two fields has been substantive. For over two decades, she has spent her career dismantling illusions around talent, giftedness, and natural ability while widening the aperture on our understanding of effort and achievement through her trailblazing work on the construct of grit and her exploration of self-control, mindset, motivation, and character. The initiatives that she coleads at the University of Pennsylvania, including Wharton People Analytics and Behavior Change for Good, have brought together Nobel laureates, influential organizations, and leading scholars in business, economics, and psychology to drive research on human behavior, interactions, organizations, cultures, and systems. A clear and masterful communicator, Duckworth’s contributions and collaborations continue to mold and propel forward the fields of education and psychology and inform a wider audience beyond academia through her writing, speaking engagements, and the nonprofit she founded, Character Lab. This profile attempts to capture the extensive intellectual footprint of one of the brilliant educational thinkers of our time whose career is far from its end but has already had a profound impact.