Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman was born February 15, 1934, and became a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. His empirical work restarted the study of emotion and non-verbal communication in psychology after decades of neglect, introducing quantitative frameworks that let researchers measure what had seemed unmeasurable. He also pioneered early research into the physiology of emotions, tracing how feeling registers in the body. By 2002, the Review of General Psychology ranked him 59th among the century's most eminent psychologists. He died November 17, 2025, having built the field's modern vo…