The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel founded in 1460 hereby confers all the dignity, rights, and privileges of an honorary doctorate in Psychology upon Professor Brent W. Roberts from the United States of America

in recognition of his introduction of a new, comprehensive, and profound understanding of the patterns of continuity and changes in personality throughout life and the processes that affect these patterns;

in recognition of convincingly showing that personality development is marked by increasing maturity,

such that people acquire attitudes and behavior that support adaptation to societal and cultural demands;

in recognition of inspiring a new generation of young researchers to study life-long personality development with state-of-the-art methods and rigorous research design.

Brent W. Roberts was born in Oceanside, California on June 11, 1963. He received his Bachelor of Science degree with Honors from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 in Personality Psychology. He joined the faculty at the University of Tulsa where he worked from 1994 until 1999 when he joined the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he has been since. He is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and is an affiliate of the Institute of Genomic Biology.  He has authored over 190 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including several influential reviews on the topic of personality development. In terms of honors, he received the J. S. Tanaka Dissertation Award for methodological and substantive contributions to the field of personality psychology in 1995. He has since been elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association of Psychological Science, and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. He has been awarded the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career award in Personality Psychology, the Theodore Millon Mid-Career award in Personality Psychology, the Henry Murray Award, and was acknowledged by Clairvate/Thomson Reuters in 2016 as a highly cited researcher (Top 1% in psychology). He has served as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Research in Personality, and Psychological Science, as a member-at-large, Executive Officer, and President-Elect for the Association for Research in Personality, as a member of the Data Monitoring Committee of the Health and Retirement Study, and sits on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Perspectives on Psychological Science. In addition to his position as Professor of Psychology, Dr. Roberts also serves as the Chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is married to Teresa Cardador, Associate Professor of Labor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with whom he shares the responsibilities and joys of two daughters, Siena and Lydia, and two dogs, Aero and Molly.