Gardner Presented ASTD's Lifetime Achievement Award

Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Howard Gardner has won the American Society for Training and Development's Lifetime Achievement in Workplace Learning and Performance award. The award recognizes an individual for a body of work that has had significant impact on the field of workplace learning and performance. The award will be presented today at the ASTD International Convention in Orlando. Gardner will accept the award by video.

"To be in the company of such previous awardees as Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Henry Mintzberg, and Harvard's own Chris Argyris is a great and humbling experience," said Gardner, the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education. "As a psychologist whose work has been primarily in the areas of human development and education, I am thrilled that my ideas on intelligence, creativity, leadership, and changing minds have proved catalytic at the workplace."

Gardner is a nationally recognized scholar whose pioneering theory of multiple intelligences has helped transform leadership, education, and human development. First explored in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, Gardner's theory challenges the traditional view that intelligence is defined only by logical reasoning and verbal-linguistic abilities. Recently, his theories on interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences have been popularized as "emotional intelligence."

"Gardner has served on the Ed School faculty since 1986, and has been the Hobbs Professor since 1998. He is also an adjunct professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and served as an adjunct professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine from 1987 to 2005. Gardner chairs the steering committee for the Ed School's Project Zero which aims to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts and humanistic and scientific disciplines. His numerous honors include the MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and 20 honorary degrees.

ASTD is the world's largest association dedicated to workplace learning and performance professionals. The organization, which was founded in 1944, has 70,000 members and associates from more than 100 countries and thousands of organizations including multinational corporations, medium-sized and small businesses, government, academia, consulting firms, and product and service suppliers.