Angela Duckworth

Angela Lee Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the most influential researchers in modern psychology and education. Before she was a professor, she was a management consultant at McKinsey and then a public school math and science teacher in New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, where she noticed something her training hadn't prepared her for: IQ alone did not explain which students went on to succeed. That observation became the question that shaped her career. She earned a B.A. in neurobiology from Harvard, an M.Sc. in neuroscience from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied under Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology. With colleagues, she developed the Grit Scale, the research tool that made it possible to measure passion and perseverance for long-term goals and test it against real outcomes, from West Point cadet retention to National Spelling Bee performance. In 2013, that body of work earned her a MacArthur Fellowship. Her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016), became an instant number-one New York Times bestseller, stayed on the list for 21 weeks, and has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Her TED talk on the same subject is one of the most-viewed in TED's history. She co-founded Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the science of character development in schools, and later transitioned from its CEO to its co-founder and chief scientist as the organization evolved. She continues to co-host No Stupid Questions, a weekly podcast on the Freakonomics Radio Network, alongside Mike Maughan. Today, Angela is also faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative and Wharton People Analytics, and she leads Phones in Focus, one of the largest research efforts ever undertaken on school cellphone policy, drawing on responses from tens of thousands of educators nationwide. Her second book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, publishes in September 2026 and argues that grit works best paired with the deliberate design of your environment. She has been repeatedly named the nation's most influential education scholar by Education Week's RHSU Edu-Scholar rankings, most recently topping the list again in 2026.