DAVID C. GEARY is a cognitive developmental psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and in evolution. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of California at Riverside, he held faculty positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Rolla campus and then in Columbia. Geary is currently a curators’ professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, and severed as department chair from 2002-2005, and from 2000 to 2003 he was the University of Missouri’s Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences.
He has published nearly than 250 articles and chapters across a wide range of topics, including cognitive and developmental psychology, education, evolutionary biology, and medicine, including three sole-authored books, Children's Mathematical Development (1994), Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (1998), and The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence (2005), and one co-authored book, Sex Differences: Summarizing More Than a Century of Scientific Research (Ellis et al., 2008). He has given invited addresses in a variety of departments (anthropology, biology, behavior genetics, computer science, education, government, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology) and Universities throughout the United States, as well as in Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.
In addition to these academic activities, he was a key contributor to the 1999 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: Kindergarten through grade twelve. Geary served on the President’s National Mathematics Panel and chaired the panel’s Learning Processes task-group. He was appointed by President Bush to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences (U.S. Department of Education), and served through 2010.
Among many distinctions is the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (1996), Thomas Jefferson Fellow (University of Missouri System), a scientific MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.
