2014 APA Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award M.A.,Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1980 Jutta Heckhausen (born March 1957) is Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine.
In the following years from 1981 to 1983, she completed her graduate studies and research on child development at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Great Britain.
From 1984 through 1986, Heckhausen worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Life-Span Psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
She was an associate member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Mid-Life Development from 1991 to 1998.
In December 2000, Heckhausen joined the University of California, Irvine as a professor of the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior.
[1][5] She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories in Bamberg, Germany.
[11][5] Jutta Heckhausen's research revolves around motivational processes and their relation to the development of individuals as they transition through different stages and confront various challenges in their lives.
[12] In 1999, Heckhausen published a monograph Developmental regulation in adulthood: Age-normative and sociostructural constraints as adaptive challenges, which comprises her work on the life-span theory of control and related empirical studies in the 1990s.
[13] Heckhausen and her collaborator Richard Schulz, formulated the life-span theory of control and tested its premise and relation to developmental in adulthood.