Stephen Suomi

Stephen J. Suomi is chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. He is also a research professor at the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. He is involved with the Experience-based Brain & Biological Development Program, launched in 2003 by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.^[1]

Suomi was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his contributions to the understanding of how socialization affects the psychological development of non-human primates.^[1] He worked in the early 1970s as a research assistant to psychologist Harry Harlow, showing that it was possible to rehabilitate rhesus monkeys that had been reared in social isolation for the first six months of life by temporarily housing them with socially normal monkeys. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Suomi worked with Harry Harlow to develop the pit of despair, a series of controversial and widely condemned experiments on baby monkeys that have been credited by some researchers as starting the animal liberation movement in the United States.^[2] Suomi has made no mention of the morality of his work.