Social and behavioral scientists

James Howison

James Howison is an information scientist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies open source software development and the sustainability of scientific software.

James Jerome Gibson (1904–1979) was an American experimental psychologist at Cornell University who founded ecological psychology, argued that perception is direct, and coined the concept of affordance.

James Ker-Lindsay

James Ker-Lindsay is a British scholar of conflict and security in Southeast Europe, known for his work on secession and the recognition of contested states.

James M. Buchanan Jr.

James M. Buchanan Jr. (1919–2013) was an American economist who founded public choice theory, applying economic analysis to politics, and won the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

James M. Poterba

James M. Poterba, also known as James Poterba, is an American economist at MIT, Mitsui Professor since 1996 and President of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2008.

James MacKinnon

James G. MacKinnon, born 1951, is a Canadian econometrician who spent his career at Queen's University and is best known for the J test and bootstrap inference.

James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934) was an American psychologist who proposed organic selection, now known as the Baldwin effect, and co-founded Psychological Review; he resigned from Johns Hopkins in 1909.

James McClelland (cognitive psychologist)

James L. (Jay) McClelland is an American cognitive psychologist who co-founded parallel distributed processing with David Rumelhart, published its landmark 1986 volumes, and teaches at Stanford University.

James McKeen Cattell

James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) was an American psychologist who held the first professorship of psychology in the United States, coined "mental tests," and edited Science for nearly fifty years.

James N. Morgan

James N. Morgan (1918–2018) was an American economist at the University of Michigan, best known as creator of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the world's longest-running household panel survey.

James Olds

James Olds (1922–1976) was an American psychologist and behavioral biologist who, with Peter Milner, discovered in 1954 that rats will press a lever to stimulate their own brains.

James R. Markusen

James R. Markusen (born 1948) is an American international trade economist at the University of Colorado Boulder, best known for the knowledge-capital model of foreign direct investment.

James Rowland Angell

James Rowland Angell (1869–1949) was an American psychologist who led the Chicago school of functionalism and later served as the fourteenth president of Yale University, from 1921 to 1937.

James Samuel Coleman

James Samuel Coleman (1926–1995) was an American sociologist, a pioneer of mathematical sociology best known for the 1966 Coleman Report and the 1990 book Foundations of Social Theory.

James Tobin

James Tobin (1918–2002) was an American economist at Yale University who won the unshared 1981 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of financial markets.

James W. Pennebaker

James W. Pennebaker is an American social and health psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, known for expressive writing research and creating the LIWC text-analysis program.

Sep 20, 2026

James W. Vaupel

James W. Vaupel (J. W. Vaupel) was an American demographer and pioneer of biodemography who founded the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock.

Jamil Zaki

Jamil Zaki is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, who directs the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory and studies empathy, compassion, and human connection.

Jamila Raqib

Jamila Raqib is an Afghanistan-born researcher who leads the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, founded by Gene Sharp in 1983 to advance nonviolent action, and gave a 2015 TED Talk.

Oct 22, 2026

Jan Jeník z Bratřic

Jan Jeník z Bratřic (1756–1845) was a Bohemian nobleman and Habsburg infantry captain who became a leading figure of the Czech National Revival as a collector.

Jan K. Brueckner

Jan K. Brueckner is an American economist, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Emeritus at UC Irvine, known for research on urban sprawl, urban spatial structure, and airline economics after deregulation.

Jane Ellen Buikstra

Jane Ellen Buikstra is an American anthropologist at Arizona State University credited with founding bioarchaeology, the study of human remains from archaeological contexts; she coined the term in 1976.

Jane I. Guyer

Jane I. Guyer (1943–2024) was a British-born American economic anthropologist of West and Equatorial Africa, a Johns Hopkins professor elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

Jane S. Norbeck

Jane S. Norbeck is an American nursing scientist known for research on social support and health outcomes, and dean of the UCSF School of Nursing from 1989 to 2000.

Janeen H. Baxter

Janeen H. Baxter is an Australian sociologist at the University of Queensland who studies family dynamics, gender inequality, and social disadvantage, and was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Janet M. Currie

Janet M. Currie is a health and labor economist who pioneered the economics of child health, taught at Princeton from 2011 to 2025, and led the American Economic Association in 2024.

Janet Yellen

Janet Yellen, American economist; first woman to lead the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury and first person to head the Fed, CEA, and Treasury; Fed chair 2014-2018, Treasury Secretary 2021-2025.

János Kornai

János Kornai (1928–2021) was a Hungarian economist who created the concepts of the shortage economy and the soft budget constraint, and taught at Harvard from 1986 to 2002.

Jaromír Korčák

Jaromír Korčák (1895–1989) was a Czech demographer, geographer, and statistician who taught at Charles University in Prague, published about 250 works, and trained the scholars who carried Czechoslovak demography forward.