Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University. He was a founding member of Harvard Project Zero in 1967 and held leadership roles at that research center from 1972 to 2023. Since 1995, he has been the co-director of The Good Project.
Gardner has written hundreds of research articles and over thirty books that have been translated into over thirty languages. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
Gardner retired from teaching in 2019. In 2020, he published his intellectual memoir A Synthesizing Mind. He continues his research and writing, including several blogs.
Howard Earl Gardner was born July 11, 1943, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Ralph Gardner and Hilde (née Weilheimer) Gardner, German-Jewish immigrants who fled Germany in 1938 just prior to World War II.
Gardner described himself as "a studious child who gained much pleasure from playing the piano". He taught piano intermittently from 1958 to 1969.
Howard Gardner had a brother named Eric who died at age seven in a sledding accident just before Howard's birth. Gardner often reflects on his childhood, his overall Jewish values and the tragic loss of his brother, whom he never got the opportunity to meet. As a young child Gardner enjoyed reading and playing the piano.
While his parents had hoped that he would attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Gardner opted to attend Wyoming Seminary, a college-preparatory school that was closer to his hometown in Pennsylvania.
Gardner then attended Harvard College, where he studied under the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. He graduated with highest honors in 1965, with a B.A. in Social Relations. After spending one year at the London School of Economics, where he studied philosophy and sociology, he went on to obtain his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Harvard, working with psychologists Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner, and philosopher Nelson Goodman.
Gardner also worked at Boston University's Aphasia Research Center, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship from 1971-1972, working with neurologist Norman Geschwind. He continued his work there for another 20 years.
In 1986, Gardner became a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has been the Chair of the Project Zero Steering Committee since 1995, and was the Co- Director for Project Zero from 1972- 2000. Gardner has also been Senior Director of the Project Zero Committee since 2000. Gardner is also a part time lecturer at Harvard University in the field of Psychology. Gardner is the John H. and the Elizabeth A. Hobbs Tutor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University (Arizona State University, 2022).
In 1967, Professor Nelson Goodman started an educational program called Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which began with a focus in arts education and now spans a wide variety of educational arenas. Howard Gardner and David Perkins were founding Research Assistants and later Co-Directed Project Zero from 1972 to 2000. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as a broad range of humanistic and scientific disciplines at the individual and institutional levels.
For over two decades, in collaboration with William Damon, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and several other colleagues, Gardner has been directing research at The Good Project on the nature of good work, good play, and good collaboration. The goal of his research is to determine what it means to achieve work that is at once excellent, engaging, and carried out in an ethical way. With colleagues Lynn Barendsen, Courtney Bither, Shelby Clark, Wendy Fischman, Carrie James, Kirsten McHugh, and Danny Mucinskas, Gardner has developed curricular toolkits on these topics for use in educational and professional circles.
Since 1995, much of the focus of his work has been on The GoodWork Project, now part of a larger initiative known as The Good Project that encourages excellence, ethics, and engagement in work, digital life, and civic society.
In 2000, Gardner, Kurt Fischer, and their colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education established the master's degree program in Mind, Brain, and Education. This program was thought to be the first of its kind around the world. Many universities in both the United States and abroad have since developed similar programs. Since then, Gardner has published books on a number of topics including Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, Five Minds for the Future, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed, and The App Generation (written with Katie Davis).
Since 2012, Gardner has been co-directing a major study of higher education in the United States with Wendy Fischman and several other colleagues. Information about the study, including several dozen blogs, is available on Gardner's website. In March 2022, MIT Press published Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner's book The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be.
At the start of 2024, Gardner was the most cited Educational Scholar in the United States, according to the Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ratings.
In 2024, Teachers College Press published two collections of Gardner’s papers: The Essential Howard Gardner on Education and The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind.
In September 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Gardner's name was among a sizable group that had turned up in a large cache of Jeffrey Epstein's emails. Gardner, who was one of the many social scientists whose research projects had received funding from Epstein, knew him only as a wealthy philanthropist, and said that he was "horrified" when Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors in 2019.