Going to Geneva Posted on April 14, 2008 David Elkind (bio) remembers working with Jean Piaget.

My mother was ill, and so I moved to California. And I was trying to get into the psychiatric institute at UCLA, but then when my mother died, there was an opening at Denver, the University of Denver. Ken Little, who had been with NIH, who was opening a new department of child development in Denver and wanted somebody to run his child clinical program. So that was ideal for me because I could do my child clinical work, but I was in a university setting. I could teach; I could do my research.

So I went there and set up the child clinical program, and that’s still going, and continued my research. And then one day, got a letter from Jean Piaget inviting me to come to Geneva, which was fantastic of course, but he didn’t have much money, so I applied for a — because I had a child, and a wife at that time, and a dog — and so I applied to NIH and got a senior postdoctoral fellow, so I packed my wife, and son, and the two dogs up and we went to Geneva for a year. And that was of course one of the most exciting and fascinating and powerful experiences in my career, to get to know Piaget, and to see firsthand his operation. And we became friends, and were friends throughout.

I was very hooks and turns in my career, but I was just fortunate to be at the right places at the right time, and just very lucky to have people who were very good teachers who directed me in the right ways, and so I was very fortunate for them.

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