Profile: Brent Roberts is a Professor
of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois,
in the Social-Personality-Organizational Division. Dr. Roberts received
his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1994 in Personality
Psychology and worked at the University
of Tulsa until 1999 when he joined the
faculty at the University
of Illinois. He received
the J. S. Tanaka Dissertation Award for methodological and substantive
contributions to the field of personality psychology in 1995. He was
awarded the prize for the most important paper published in the Journal of
Research in Personality in 2000. Most recently he received the Diener
mid-career award in Personality Psychology from the Foundation for Personality
and Social Psychology and was appointed
as a
Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois. He has served as the Associate Editor for the Journal
of Research in Personality, as a member-at-large for the Association for Research
in Personality. He is currently the Executive Officer for the Association
for Research in Personality, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, International Journal of Selection and
Assessment, Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Perspectives
on Psychological Science.
Research: Dr. Roberts’s primary
line of research is dedicated to understanding the patterns of continuity and
change in personality across the decades of adulthood and the mechanisms that
affect these patterns, with a particular focus on the development of
conscientiousness. Dr. Roberts has a second line of research on
personality assessment. This research line includes studies focusing on
the meaning and scope of the trait of conscientiousness and the relationship
between conscientiousness and the health process, the utility of contextualized
assessments of personality, and the use of IRT in personality assessment.
