Harry W. Gardiner

Harry Gardiner is retired from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where he taught for more than 25 years. He has degrees from American International College, the University of Hawaii, and Manchester University in England, where he met his future wife, who was from Thailand. He chased her to Asia, where they married and moved to the United States two years later. He often says that he "grew up" in an Asian American family in which his wife was Asian, he was American, and their children were Asian American and he was the minority--"the one with the blond hair and the blue eyes!" He was a charter member of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, served as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and is a consulting editor for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. In addition to publishing articles in a wide variety of journals and participating in national and international meetings, he has coauthored a number of chapters on cross-cultural topics for other books. He has engaged in training, teaching, and research in Europe, Asia, and the United States. In his "spare time" he enjoys writing for Cobblestone, a history magazine for young children, and has contributed interviews with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Muppet creator Jim Henson, Tom Rockwell, son of the artist Norman Rockwell and author of the popular book "How to Eat Fried Worms," among others. He enjoys watching the development of his five young grandchildren as they navigate a much more culturally diversified world than he experienced at their ages. The photo to the right shows him at the age of two "working" on one of his first books.