Ed Diener

Edward Diener (born 1946) is an American psychologist, professor, and author. Diener is a professor of psychology at the Universities of Utah and Virginia, and Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois as well as a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization. He is noted for his research over the past thirty years on happiness — the measurement of well-being; temperament and personality influences on well-being; theories of well-being; income and well-being; and cultural influences on well-being. As shown on Google Scholar as of December 2015, Diener's publications have been cited over 113,000 times.

For his fundamental research on the subject, Diener is nicknamed Dr. Happiness. He has worked with researchers Daniel Kahneman and Martin Seligman – and he is a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization.

Background

Diener was born in 1946 in Glendale, California and grew up on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

He attended San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno and subsequently received his B.A. in Psychology in 1968 from California State University at Fresno. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974 and was a faculty member at the University of Illinois for 34 years, retiring from active teaching in 2008.