Professor Little has been a major innovator in the field of personality assessment and motivation and is the 2020 winner of the Henry A. Murray Award for distinguished research on the study of lives awarded by the Association for Research in Personality. He pioneered the development of “personal projects analysis” as a way of looking at the coherence of personality. His research has shown that human well-doing is enhanced by the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives.
Professor Brian R. Little received his early education in British Columbia and his Ph.D. in personality psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford and an Inaugural Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has received major awards for his teaching at Carleton, McGill and Harvard Universities. For three consecutive years (2002-2004) he was elected a Favorite Professor by the graduating classes at Harvard.
From 2010 to 2021, he was a Research Professor in Psychology at Cambridge University and developed and taught a popular course on Personality and Well-Being for the Executive MBA program at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He is currently a Senior Fellow in Person-Analytics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.