Laurence D. Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University, was in a slump in 1995. But that slump helped him get involved with research that would eventually influence a Supreme Court decision on the death penalty and earn him a major research award from a Swiss foundation.
In December, the Jacobs Foundation awarded Mr. Steinberg its first Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for Productive Youth Development in a ceremony at the University of Zurich. The prize, worth about $1-million, is to be spent on research.
Mr. Steinberg had just completed Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do in 1995 when he feared he “was never going to have another good idea again. I felt like I just didn’t have any more interesting things in me.”
In the book, one of several he had written for general audiences, the psychologist and his co-authors found that factors outside the classroom, such as parents’ belief in the importance of education, greatly affect students’ performance.
The professor, now 57, says he got a lot of positive feedback on the book from parents and teachers, who would write to him saying that it had changed how they would raise their children or work with their students.
In the meantime, a therapist who was helping him work through his slump told him to take it easy at work instead of keeping himself continuously occupied. For a year, Mr. Steinberg stuck to teaching and did not begin any new research projects.
So he had some time to spare when he got a call from a friend with connections to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, asking for his help on a research network examining psychopathology and development. He was surprised by the request because he had no experience in that aspect of adolescent psychology.
But that project started his relationship with the foundation, which later supported his research on how the adolescent mind differs from the adult mind and why the criminal-justice system should take such differences into account. Of his research, that work has had the greatest impact on social policy, Mr. Steinberg says, influencing the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in the case Roper v. Simmons.
He recalls reading the opinion, which forbade the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by offenders younger than 18, and thinking, “Wow, that’s pretty incredible. There’s the research that we’d been working on for eight years now, and it’s being cited as a reason to eliminate the death penalty.”
“As somebody who’s interested in doing science that affects policy and practice, seeing your work cited in the Supreme Court decision feels amazing,” he adds.
In his acceptance speech in December, Mr. Steinberg said he planned to use the money to expand his research on adolescent development to other parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.
Anne C. Petersen, a research professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was chair of the jury that selected Mr. Steinberg for the Jacobs award. She says that his rigorous ways of approaching questions make him well suited to tackle research that is relevant to public policy, where the stakes are so high. He understands the existing research, she says, but doesn’t make assumptions that would hinder his ability to get the full picture.
“Throughout his career, he’s been really responsible in doing scientific work and then looking at, What does the general public need to know about it?” she says. “Most of us have not done that.”
Mr. Steinberg graduated from Vassar College, received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1977, and worked at the University of California at Irvine and the University of Wisconsin at Madison before coming to Temple.
The first book he and a co-author wrote for a general audience, about how part-time jobs affect teenagers’ development, also generated a lot of buzz, he says. “I got hooked on doing research that had clear policy applications,” he says, because “people seemed so much more interested in it than in basic science.”