Dr. Gardner graduated from Harvard University in 1965 with a BA in social relations, and studied under the renowned Erik Erikson. After spending one year at the London School of Economics, he went on to obtain his PhD in developmental psychology at Harvard while working with psychologists Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner, and philosopher Nelson Goodman.
For his postdoctoral fellowship, Gardner worked alongside Norman Geschwind at Boston Veterans Administration Hospital and continued his work there for another 20 years. In 1986, Gardner became a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Since 1995, much of the focus of his work has been on The GoodWork Project, now part of a larger initiative known as The Good Project that encourages excellence, ethics, and engagement in work, digital life, and beyond.

In 2000, Gardner, Kurt Fischer and their colleagues established the master’s degree program in Mind, Brain and Education. This program was thought to be the first of its kind around the world. Many universities in both the United States and abroad have since developed similar programs. Four years later in 2004, Gardner would continue writing about the mind and brain and would publish Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds, a book about seven forms of mind-change.

Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (the “Genius Prize”) in 1981 and the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2000. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In 2011, Gardner received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, and in 2015, he was awarded the Brock International Prize in Education.