E. Lowell Kelly (1905–1986).

Presents an obituary for E. Lowell Kelly. Kelly was an innovator, an iconoclast, a public-spirited individual, and an enemy of pretension. He constantly helped people solve their problems, from personal counseling in his early professional years to later work with many graduate students as they labored through their dissertations. Early in World War II, when he learned that lives were lost in night training because naval aviation cadets crashed into the planes ahead of them, he realized that the cadets could not judge their distance from a plane with only one tail light, and he introduced the simple notion of having two lights a standard distance apart. At the organizational level, Lowell worked for the Veterans Administration for a decade, while also carrying out his academic responsibilities at the University of Michigan. His service to the American Psychological Association included chairing the Executive Committee for the Boulder Conference on Graduate Training in Clinical Psychology (1948-1949), a conference that left its mark on the field for decades to come. He served on the Board of Directors for APA for six years and was president of both the Division of Consulting Psychology and the Division of Clinical Psychology. He was elected president of the Association and served in that role from 1954 to 1955. Throughout his career, Kelly's scientific interests and contributions centered on assessment. He tackled the problem of evaluating performance on the job, confronting the difficulty that criterion measures of such performance do not agree well with each other. Longitudinal research was Kelly's other focus. Throughout his scientific career, Kelly studied such varied phenomena as synaesthesia, graphology, pharmacology, and apparent movement. Kelly passed away in 1986. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)