Fonds UAA Fonds 0364 - Joseph Russell Royce fonds

Joseph Russel Royce was born in New York City on August 19, 1921. He completed his undergraduate degree at Denison University in Ohio (1941) and performed graduate work at Ohio State University for a year, until he was made a Research Officer in the U.S. Air Force Aviation Psychology Program (1942). Following the end of WWII, Royce went on to complete his PhD at the University of Chicago (1951) where he received mentorship from Roger Sperry and L.L. Thurstone. Royce’s dissertation was in experimental physiological-comparative psychology; this led to a doctoral fellowship at Jackson Laboratory.
Royce was hired as a professor at the University of Redlands in 1951, where he was a Faculty Fellow in the Ford Foundation Interdisciplinary Program of Graduate Studies. In 1960, Royce joined the University of Alberta, where he was the Head of the newly-established Department of Psychology (1960-1967) and Director of the Centre for Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology, which he co-founded with Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Herman Tennessen (1966-1979).
Royce was one of the most well-known psychologists in Canada and authored over 100 scientific papers in various fields including behavioral genetics, individuality and personality, and philosophical psychology. He was elected as a Fellow of both the Canadian and American Psychological Associations. In 1986, he retired from the U of A as a professor Emeritus.
At the age of 68, Royce passed away at his home in Edmonton on September 21, 1989. The Joseph R. Royce Conference was named in his honor. As of 2018, it is now called the Royce-Harder Research Conference.