Kennon Sheldon

Kennon Marshall Sheldon is a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. His research is in the areas of well-being, motivation, self-determination theory, personality, and positive psychology. In 2002 he was a recipient of a Templeton Foundation "Positive Psychology" prize and in 2014 received the Ed and Carol Diener award for mid-career achievement in personality psychology. He is the author of Optimal Human Being: An Integrated Multi-level Perspective, Self-determination Theory in the Clinic: Motivating physical and mental health, and has written and edited several other academic books, as well as more than 200 academic articles and book chapters.

Education and early career Sheldon received a B.S. in psychology from Duke University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in social and personality psychology from the University of California, Davis in 1992. At UC Davis he worked under psychologist Robert Emmons, whose research on personal goal-striving shaped Sheldon's subsequent focus on motivation and well-being.

After completing his doctorate, Sheldon spent six years at the University of Rochester as a postdoctoral researcher and visiting assistant professor, where he worked alongside Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, the co-developers of self-determination theory. He joined the faculty of the University of Missouri in 1997.