Angela Duckworth

Angela Lee Duckworth was born and raised in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, New Jersey. As she explains in Grit, her father—a Chinese immigrant who worked as a chemist for the massive chemical company DuPont but always dreamed of achieving success as an academic researcher—was obsessed with “geniuses” and frequently distraught to realize that there weren’t any in his family. Despite not being born a “genius,” Duckworth went on to study neurobiology at Harvard University and graduate with honors. After college, she spent two years establishing and directing Boston’s Summerbridge (now Breakthrough) academic summer program for underserved middle school students. Then, she went to Oxford University, where she earned a master’s degree in Neuroscience on a Marshall Scholarship, and joined the prestigious but controversial multinational consulting firm McKinsey for a year. Next, she taught middle and high school math and science for five years. In 2002, Duckworth began her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Many of the experiments she discusses in Grit were part of her graduate work studying the effects of self-discipline and grit on achievement in settlings like the National Spelling Bee and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In 2007, she created the Grit Scale questionnaire, popularized the concept of grit in academic psychology, and became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her research, and she became a household name with the publication of Grit in 2016. In addition to her position in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychology, Duckworth also holds secondary positions at the university’s Graduate School of Education and Wharton School of Business. As of 2021, she also runs the Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to science-based personality development for children, and co-hosts the Freakonomics spin-off podcast No Stupid Questions.