Marquis Who's Who Millennium Magazine

236 MILLENNIUM M any people become psychologists for very personal reasons. Dr. Chris(tiane) Lange-Kuettner became interested in psychology once she realized that tensions can arise, not because of politics and economics but aspirations and work ethics. Although her parents had the same socioeconomic status when they married, they came from very different backgrounds: her mother, Hildegard Wersche, was from a family of high achievers, as her father was editor-in- chief of a local German newspaper, and Chris’ father, Günther Lange, was from a family of illiterate peasants who had been robbed of their small private property by the East German communist state. The family thrived with this tension as her father became a high-ranking police commissar and both daughters studied medicine and psychology. Dr. Lange-Kuettner lived in places with high tensions, such as close to the Berlin Wall in the 1980s and in rioting North London at the turn of the century. An accomplished researcher, she was instrumental in helping her current employer, the inner-city London Metropolitan University turn around its 70 percent student failure rate into an achievement rate of 90 percent. She worked as a visiting professor at the University of Konstanz near the Swiss border. In 2014 Dr. Lange-Kuettner became an honorary associate professor at the University of Nicosia, also a divided town as Berlin once was. Dr. Lange-Kuettner began her career with work in adult psychiatry, child and family services and the Anna Freud Centre, but her Masters and PhD on the development of graphic competence, as well as her post-doc time in a cognitive science lab where she programmed a reaction time visual memory experiment for children somewhat changed her focus from mental health to visual cognition. In her first academic position at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, she extended her research to work with infants and incorporated language and sounds into her experiments. For instance, in collaboration with Angela Friederici and the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, she found that Scottish and Saxon infants actually preferred repetitive sea bird sounds - which adults loathed - to melodic garden birds. More recently, she works on factors that hinder intelligence, such as error learning in the memory for written words, over-compliance that can dampen IQ, and in collaboration with Bruno Averbeck of the NIH/NIMH in Bethesda, Md., she discovered a massive detrimental effect of a small percentage of random stochastic feedback on children’s sequence learning. Chris Lange-Kuettner, PhD Psychologist London Metropolitan University London, England