Stephen Suomi

Stephen J. Suomi is chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. He is also a research professor at the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. He is involved with the Experience-based Brain & Biological Development Program, launched in 2003 by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Suomi was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his contributions to the understanding of how socialization affects the psychological development of non-human primates. Suomi has made no mention of the morality of his work.

Education and career Suomi received a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in the same subject from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1971. He became a full professor with the university's psychology department in 1984, and began to work for the NICHD in 1983. Both the American Psychological Association and the American Society of Primatologists defended Suomi's research as scientifically useful and ethically sound. However, in 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would end monkey experiments for financial reasons, stressing that PETA's campaign "was not a factor in this decision". The following year, it announced it would review its policies on all primate research.