William S. Verplanck was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on January 16, 1916. He earned his BS in 1937 and MS in 1938 from the University of Virginia. He received his PhD under Clarence Graham at Brown University in 1941. Verplanck spent the next four years conducting research on night vision at the Naval Medical Research Laboratory. He taught at Indiana University, Harvard, Stanford, Hunter College, and the University of Maryland, until he found his niche at the University of Tennessee. He stayed at Tennessee until his retirement in 1981.
Though interested in several areas in the field of psychology, one of Verplanck's major goals was to introduce ethological method and thinking to American psychologists. Verplanck spend a sabbatical at Oxford University with Niko Tinbergen and other leading ethologists in 1956. He authored A Glossary of Some Terms Used in the Objective Analysis of Behavior in 1957, which helped to facilitate communication between ethologists and behaviorists. Verplanck was also one of the founders of the Psychonomic Society.
Verplanck died on September 30, 2002, in Knoxville, Tennessee.
From the guide to the William S. Verplanck papers, 1916-1981, (Center for the History of Psychology)
