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.

Professor Little believes strongly in making the fruits of his research available to the general public. His Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being was an Amazon best seller and his TED talk “Who Are You, Really?” has been viewed on YouTube and TED platforms over 20 million times. He has delivered over 800 presentations on personality and well-being to diverse audiences around the world. He was one of the co-developers of Ray Dalio’s PrinciplesYOU, a free personality assessment device launched in April, 2021.

Brian’s unique approach to the science of personality appears in three books:
Personal Projects Pursuit: Goals, Action and Human Flourishing,
Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-being and
Who Are You, Really? The Surprising Puzzle of Personality.