Urie Bronfenbrenner

Urie Bronfenbrenner (April 29, 1917 – September 25, 2005) was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. Bronfenbrenner's writings about the limitations of understanding child development solely from experimental laboratory research and the potential for using contextual variability to provide insight into developmental processes

Early life and education Bronfenbrenner was born in Moscow on April 29, 1917, When he was six, his family moved to the United States, first to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then a year later to rural New York State. His father worked as a neuropathologist at a hospital for the developmentally disabled called Letchworth Village, located in Rockland County, N.Y.

Bronfenbrenner received a bachelor's in psychology and music from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1938. After the war, he briefly worked as an assistant chief clinical psychologist for the newly-founded Veterans Administration Clinical Psychology Training Program in Washington, D.C. At Cornell, his research focused on child development and the impact of social forces in this development for the rest of his career.

He was appointed to a federal panel about development in impoverished children around 1964 and 1965, with this panel helping in the creation of Head Start in 1965.

Views on human development and ecological systems theory Bronfenbrenner saw the process of human development as being shaped by the interaction between an individual and their environment. Furthermore, he eventually renamed his theory the bioecological model to recognize the importance of biological processes in development. However, he only recognized biology as producing a person's potential, with this potential being realized or not via environmental and social forces. Because of his testimony, he was invited to the White House to discuss the issue with Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson, with whom he discussed child-care programs of other countries. The James McKeen Catell Award from the American Psychological Society The American Psychological Association renamed its "Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society" as "The Bronfenbrenner Award."

Publications Two Worlds of Childhood: US and USSR. Simon & Schuster, 1970. Influencing Human Development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. Influences on Human Development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next. New York: Free Press, 1996. Making Human Beings Human: Bioecological Perspectives on Human Development. Sage, 2005.