Daniel Goleman - Family, Education and Early Life

Family, Education and Early Life

Goleman was born in 1946 in Stockton, California, the son of Jewish college professors. He received a scholarship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to attend Amherst College. The Amherst Independent Scholar program allowed him to transfer for his junior year to the University of California at Berkeley. He then returned to Amherst where he graduated magna cum laude. He then received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to attend Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. studying under David C. McClelland. He studied in India using a pre-doctoral fellowship from Harvard and a post-doctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council. He wrote his first book based on travel in India and Sri Lanka and then returned as a visiting lecturer to Harvard where during the 1970s his topic of the psychology of consciousness was popular. McClelland recommended him for a job at Psychology Today from which he was recruited by The New York Times in 1984.

Goleman co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning at Yale University's Child Studies Center which then moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently he co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He sits on the board of the Mind & Life Institute.