Terrie E. Moffitt

Terrie Edith Moffitt (born March 9, 1955) is an American-British clinical psychologist who is best known for her pioneering research on the development of antisocial behavior and for her collaboration with colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi in research on gene-environment interactions in mental disorders.

Moffitt is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University (USA) and Professor of Social behavior and Development in the Medical Research Council's Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Center at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology an Neuroscience King's College London (UK).

She is Associate Director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1037 people born in 1972-73 in Dunedin, New Zealand.

She also launched the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which follows 1100 British families with twins born in 1994–1995.

Moffitt grew up in North Carolina, United States, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree (BA, Psychology 1977).

She continued her training in clinical psychology at the University of Southern California (MA, Experimental Animal Behavior 1981; PhD, Clinical Psychology 1984) and completed postdoctoral training at University of California, Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute.

She is a licensed clinical psychologist, who completed her clinical hospital training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (1984).

Her work on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand has identified patterns of intimate as well as stranger crime, including discoveries about the role of females as initiators of violence.

Professor Moffitt is also carrying out an important large-scale follow-up of twins in the UK to investigate biological, psychological, and social influences on development.

In 1985, Moffitt became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was promoted to full professor in 1995.

Moffitt has subsequently served on the faculty at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and Duke University.

Terrie Moffitt studies how genetic and environmental risks work together to shape the course of abnormal human behaviors and psychiatric disorders.

Her particular interest is in antisocial and criminal behavior, but she also studies depression, psychosis, addiction, and cognitive aging.

Her two publications in the journal Science in 2002 and 2003 with her colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi were among the first reports of GxE in humans.

The first paper showed that children who carried a polymorphism in the MAOA gene were more vulnerable to developing antisocial behavior following exposure to maltreatment during childhood.

The second paper showed that individuals who carried a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) were more vulnerable to developing depression following exposure to stressful life events.

Moffitt and her colleagues have authored a number of articles on theory and methods in GxE research in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience.

Moffitt’s research on GxE in the development of antisocial behavior has stimulated a global discussion of the idea of criminal intent and responsibility, as well as raising profound questions about humane strategies for crime prevention among abused children at risk of future violence.

The second Science paper, on the interaction of SLC6A4 and life stress has generated enormous controversy, culminating in meta-analyses published in leading journals in psychiatry and medicine.

Some meta-analyses do not support the original finding, some do, and animal and imaging work on the hypothesis should also be considered.

Moffitt was awarded the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Distinguished Career Award in 2006.

Her work since 2010 is leading the Dunedin Study into the study of aging.

Moffitt is best known for her theory of adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent offender antisocial behavior.

Moffitt's theory holds that there are two main types of antisocial offenders in society.

Adolescence-limited offenders exhibit antisocial behavior only during adolescence.

Life-course-persistent offenders begin to behave antisocially early in childhood and continue this behavior into adulthood.

For her studies of crime and human development she was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

Moffitt is also known for her research on gene-environment interaction (GxE).

However, the general approach of studying candidate genes, which was the only approach available when Moffitt and Caspi’s GxE work was done, has since 2010 been superseded by whole-genome approaches.

Moffitt and Caspi jointly received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in 2010 for their innovative research on "the interplay between genetic disposition and environmental influences in the development of children."

She received an honorary degree from the University of Basel in 2014.

In November 2022 Moffitt, was awarded the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Rutherford Medal, along with the Dunedin Study, team leader Richie Poulton and team members Murray Thomson and Avshalom Caspi.

Moffitt was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to social science.

Moffitt is the most cited author of in several psychology journals such as Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Psychological Review, Development and Psychopathology, and Criminology.

Moffitt and Caspi were awarded the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 2016; the citation for their shared award emphasizes their research contributions demonstrating "how early life experiences shape health disparities and how genetic factors shape and are shaped by environmental factors."

In 2018, Moffitt was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.