Zhang Kan

Introduction

Zhang Kan (张侃, born 1949) has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, engineering and state capacity. An engineering psychologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychology, he led the development of psychological selection systems for the country's most demanding professions — pilots, astronauts, air traffic controllers — work recognized with national science and technology awards. He directed the Institute of Psychology twice (1994–97 and 2006–10), presided over the Chinese Psychological Society (2001–09), and carried Chinese psychology into the international bodies it had spent decades rejoining: executive committee of the International Association of Applied Psychology, then executive committee and vice presidency of the International Union of Psychological Science (2008–12). After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake he helped organize the national psychological assistance effort — psychology at disaster scale.

Early Life and Education

Zhang was born in 1949 (in Wuhu, Anhui, by most accounts). Details of his early education are thinly documented; he took his doctorate in psychology at the University of Illinois in 1990, as China's academic exchanges with the United States were reopening.

Academic and Professional Career

He worked at the CAS Institute of Psychology from the early 1980s, in its social and engineering psychology division, and led it as director for two separated terms. He presided over the Chinese Psychological Society from 2001 to 2009, led the Chinese Ergonomics Society (1998–2004), and served internationally on the executive of the International Association of Applied Psychology (1998–2006) and of the International Union of Psychological Science (2004–08) before becoming the Union's vice president (2008–12). His selection-systems work won a military science and technology progress award (2001), and he shared the National Science and Technology Progress First Class Award (2010) for psychological selection standards. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in 2006 and received the IAAP's award for distinguished professional contributions at the Melbourne congress in 2010.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Selection by science

The psychological selection programs he led — for flight, space, and high-consequence professions — built on the psychometric tradition of Gong Yaoxian and Zhang Houcan and pushed it to operational scale: national standards, validated criteria, and selection batteries still in use.

The institutional diplomat

Completing the bridge-building of Jing Qicheng's generation, Zhang's decade in international leadership posts normalized Chinese psychology's standing in the applied as well as the scientific unions — and at home, his decade at the Society's head coincided with the discipline's largest expansion.