Gardner is part of the third wave of individuals affected by the rise of
fascism in Europe. His Jewish parents, Ralph and Hilde Gardner , fled
from their native Nuremberg Germany, arriving in America on the infamous
Kristallnacht, November 9 1938. Gardner was born on July 11 1943 and
grew up in Scranton , a medium sized former coal mining city in northeastern
Pennsylvania. He was an excellent student and a promising young pianist.
Gardner quit formal study of music at the start of adolescence but continued
to play and teach sporadically, and music remains important in his life. He
attended local schools in the Scranton area but claims that his education
began in earnest when he arrived at Harvard College in September 1961.
There he studied history, sociology, and psychology, and audited a record
number of courses that spanned the curriculum. He also decided to become
a scholar rather than pursue one of the standard professions that his family
had in mind for him-the first in his family to attend college.

As an undergraduate, Gardner worked with the noted psychoanalyst Erik
Erikson. After spending a postgraduate year as a Harvard Fellow at the
London School of Economics, where he read philosophy and sociology,
Gardner decided to continue graduate studies in developmental psychology
at Harvard. In addition to his ties to founding cognitivitsts Piaget and Bruner,
Gardner also worked closely with the psycholinguist Roger Brown and the
noted epistemologist, Nelson Goodman. After completing his doctoral
studies, Gardner had the opportunity to work with Norman Geschwind,
a brilliant and charismatic neurologist, and he was able to pursue empirical
work in both developmental and neuropsychology for the ensuing two
decades. Maintaining his Harvard connection throughout, Gardner avoided
the usual tenure ladder and became a Professor of Cognition and Education
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. Thus, while he is
widely traveled, and conducted field research in China in the 1980s, his
entire adult career has been spent in Cambridge.

Gardner's work is best described as an effort to understand and explicate
the broadest and highest reaches of human thought, with a particular focus
on the development and breakdown of intellectual capacities, broadly
construed. He was a founding member of Project Zero at Harvard University,
a group that is dedicated to the study of higher cognitive processes, with a
special focus on creativity and the arts. His work in neuropsychology focused
on the breakdown of artistic and other high level skills under various forms
of brain pathology. His theory of multiple intelligences recognizes a broad
swathe of human capacities, including ones from the arts and from the realm
of human intercourse that have traditionally been considered nonintellectual
and perhaps not even cognitive. His studies of extraordinary individuals,
including leaders as well as creators, are cognitively construed; he views
leadership as an interaction between the minds of the leader and the minds
of his or her constituency. And in his recent collaborative research on work,
he looks for evidence of work that is not only excellent in quality but also
displays a sense of responsibility about the uses to which that work is put.

Gardner is best known, and properly so, for his capacities as a synthesizer
of vast amount of research and theory. His first books treated human
developed from the perspective of the arts ("The Arts and Human
Development" ,1973); structuralist thought (Piaget, Chomsky,
Levi-Strauss-1973); neuropsychology ("The Shatterred Mind")-1975;
cognitive science ("The Minds New Science "1985) and Developmental
Psychology (1978/1982) an original and well regarded text that he elected
not to update.. With the publication of Frames of Mind in 1983 Gardner
began to put forth his own views about the mind. This work introduces the
claim that standard views of intelligence are flawed and that human beings
are better described as possessing 8 or more relatively autonomous
intellectual capacities, termed the multiple intelligences, This work quickly
became well known and much discussed and, not surprisingly, Gardner
became a far more controversial figure. While continuing to produce works
of synthesis, Gardner devoted more of his attention to putting forth his own
ideas about creativity (Creating Minds 1993) leadership (Leading Minds
1995), and education (The Unschooled Mind, 1991 The Disciplined Mind,
1999 and Intelligence Reframed 1999). His most recent work, Changing
Minds (2004) is an examination of the processes by which individuals
change their own minds and the minds of other persons.

While he is best known as a synthesizer, Gardner's other research and
professional accomplishments merit attention as well. His early empirical
work in developmental psychology demonstrated the trajectory of metaphoric
production and perceptual capacities in young children as well as the sensitivity
of children to style in different art forms. With Judy Gardner, he was
among the first to demonstrate imitative capacities in early infancy. With
Dennie Wolf, he traced the development in young children of the range of
symbol using capacities. With Ellen Winner, he examined the complementary
aspects of two forms of figurative competence-metaphor and irony. Turning
to neuropsycyhology, Gardner was the first investigator in modern times to
explore the role of the right hemisphere in linguistic and paralinguistic spheres.
With Ellen Winner, Hiram Brownell, and others, he led a research effort on
the breakdown of narrative, metaphoric, and other forms of linguistic and
artistic competence's under various conditions of brain damage. He wrote
the chapter on "Extraordinary Cognitive Achievement" in the 1997
Handbook of Child Psychology and, with Seana Moran, has produced an
expanded and more original update for the 2006 edition. In that updated
chapter, Moran and Gardner describe extraordinary achievement across
several domains, including art, science, leadership, and moral excellence.

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence was conceived of as a contribution
to psychology but its greatest influence has been in education. First in the
United States, and then in many other parts of the world, educators have
drawn inspiration from his theory and have created a plethora of
applications in the areas of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Many
programs and schools have adopted the phrase "multiple intelligences" and
hundreds of books, articles, films, and other adaptations have been created,
many with neither Gardner's knowledge nor approval. Spurred in part by
this great interest in the educational implications of his work, Gardner has
undertaken several projects in education (see pzweb.harvard.edu and his
books Multiple Intelligences (1993) and Intelligence Reframed (1999).
He has stressed that neither multiple intelligences theory nor any other
scientific innovation can be applied directly in the classroom; educational
practice is always a reflection of goals and values, which should be explicit
as possible. In his book The Disciplined Mind (1991) Gardner has
embraced the educational goal of "understanding in the principal disciplines,";
via a number of concrete examples, he has demonstrated how a recognition
of multiple intelligences can aid in the inculcation of disciplinary understanding.
More broadly, in his educational work, Gardner has pushed for recognition
and development of a wide range of human capacities; modes of assessment
that are natural (.e.g portfolios, process folios, performances of understanding)
and that encompass many forms of critical and creative thinking; pedagogical
approaches that stimulate imaginative capacities; and institutional settings that
encourage productive thought and creation with a range of materials and
genres. Among his most important projects and collaborations have been
ATLAS communities, Arts Propel, Teaching for Understanding, Project
Spectrum, and a study of interdisciplinarity; over the years he has had rich
interchanges with the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Key Learning
Community in Indianapolis, and the New City School in St Louis His study
of arts education in China was the centerprise of "To Open Minds" Chinese
Clues to the Dilemma of American Education" (1989).

By choice, Gardner has not undertaken major editorial or professional roles.
He sees himself primarily as an independent scholar and public intellectual.
However, with his long time colleague David Perkins, Gardner he has been
instrumental in the founding and flourishing of Project Zero, now one of the
oldest and most respected educational research sites in the world. He is an
accomplished grant getter and has also helped to raise significant funds for
Harvard University. He belongs to numerous honorary societies and has won
various awards, including a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981 (the first
year of the Fellowship), the Grawemeyer Award in Education (first American
to win this award) in 1990, and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). He is also
the recipient of 20 honorary degrees including degrees from universities in Italy,
Ireland, Israel, and Canada. Married since 1982 to developmental psychologist
Ellen Winner, he is the father of four children: Kerith (b. 1969), Jay (1971),
Andrew (1976) and Benjamin (1985). Self described as a happy workaholic,
he spends his free time with his family, a close knit group that spans several
generations.