C. Keith Conners, PhD

Keith Conners had an extraordinary and diverse career as an academic, clinician, researcher, lecturer, author, editor-in-chief, and administrator. His dedication to the study of ADHD and other childhood problems propelled him to the forefront of his field. His intense interest in this topic led him to write several books on attention disorders and neuropsychology, as well as hundreds of journal articles and book chapters based on his research on the effects of food additives, nutrition, stimulant drugs, diagnosis, and dimensional syndromes. He is highly recognized in the field of psychology by his numerous contributions.

Dr. Conners was born in 1933 in the copper mining town of Bingham, Utah and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. At age 16, he entered the Great Books program at the University of Chicago. Subsequently, he was nominated as a Rhodes Scholar and was accepted at Queen’s College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he received an introduction to psychology in the Psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology program. Dr. Conners entered the Clinical Psychology doctorate program at Stanford and then later transferred to Harvard into a more diverse program that combined anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. Afterward, he worked as a clinical psychologist and research assistant for Leon Eisenberg, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, he analyzed the data for a study of Dexedrine’s effect on symptomatology in delinquents. His realization that a lot of the children in the study underwent remarkable improvements on Dexedrine® and Ritalin® was the beginning of a lifelong study of this topic.

Dr. Conners was greatly intrigued by children exhibiting a diverse pattern of symptoms. He collected data on non-clinical and clinical children with an existing symptom list, and eventually published the first version of his parent rating scale. He also discovered that teachers were able to recognize dramatic changes in drug-treated children, which resulted in his use of teacher ratings as a method of documenting drug-related behavior change. People seemed to need these brief, simple questionnaires. The increasing use and popularity of the parent and teacher rating scales eventually made his original articles among the most cited in the literature. Dr. Conners ran a clinical program in ADHD at Duke University and was involved in the national multisite co-operative study with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). After his retirement, Dr. Conners continued to lecture, conduct workshops on diagnosis and assessment, and served as a consultant to numerous government and private organizations.

Dr. Conners published numerous tests with MHS over the past several decades, including, but not limited to tools used in assessments of ADHD in youth and adults; broadband social, emotional, and behavioral symptoms in youth; and performance-based assessments of attention and impulse control.

Dr. Conners passed away in 2017; however, his legacy lives on through the advancements he made in ADHD research and assessment over his prolific career.