Edward Zigler

Zigler was married in 1955 to Bernice Gorelick (d. 2017) and the couple had one son, Scott. Zigler died in his sleep in North Haven, Connecticut on February 7, 2019.

In 2000, Zigler received the 6th Annual Heinz Award in Public Policy.

In 1978, Zigler founded the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University with funding from the Bush Foundation of Minnesota. The focus of the center is to use the findings of empirical research on child development to inform public policy efforts to improve children's lives. The center was renamed as the Edward Zigler Center for Child Development and Social Policy in 2005.

He taught one year at the University of Missouri at Columbia before joining the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 1959. In 1970, US President Richard Nixon appointed Zigler the first director of the Office of Child Development. There, Zigler worked to launch the Head Start program created under the Johnson Administration.

Zigler was born in Kansas City, Missouri to Frank Zigler and Gertrude Gleitman Zigler. He attended the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he received a B.S. in 1954. The next year, Zigler matriculated at the University of Texas, where he received a PhD in developmental psychology in 1958.

Edward Frank Zigler (March 1, 1930 – February 7, 2019) was an American developmental psychologist and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. In addition to his academic research on child development, he was best known as one of the architects of the federal Head Start program.