Jan Strelau, a NIAS Fellow twice (1983 en 1992), sadly passed away on the 3rd of August, 2020.
Professor Jan Strelau passed away on that day at the age of eighty-nine. He was a Polish psychologist best known for his outstanding and pioneering studies on individual differences in temperament. He formulated the regulative theory of temperament, and together with his collaborators, he conducted studies addressed to the functional meaning of temperament and its heritability.
Strelau was professor of psychology at Warsaw University from 1968 to 2001 and was since 2001 professor at Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, where he took the positions of Vice-rector for Research and International Affairs (2002–2010), Vice-rector for Research (2010–2012), and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees (2012–2016).
Strelau was born in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea and foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences. He gained honorary degrees (Dr.h.c.) of University of Gdańsk,University of Poznań and State University of Humanistic Sciences in Moscow. In 2000 he was awarded the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science (regarded as the “Polish Nobel Prize”). In 2011, he received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
He died in Warsaw, aged 89.