Edward Frank Zigler (March 1, 1930 – February 7, 2019) was an American developmental psychologist and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University.
[2] He taught one year at the University of Missouri at Columbia before joining the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 1959.
Among many additional public service contributions, he served as chair of the Vietnamese Children's Resettlement Advisory Group for President Ford, chaired the Fifteenth Anniversary Head Start Committee which President Carter tasked to plan the future course of the Head Start program, and helped to construct the Family and Medical Leave Act .
The focus of the center is to use the findings of empirical research on child development to inform public policy efforts to improve children's lives.
This work, which was influenced by the developmental theorist Heinz Werner, lay the foundation for more a meaningful taxonomy of intellectual disabilities, beyond IQ level alone.