Born in 1923 in Minneapolis, Jerome D. Schein received a BA in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1946 and then went on to take a MA in industrial psychology in 1947 and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology Requirements in 1958.

He began his academic career teaching clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin, and then relocated to Florida, where he was an assistant professor of psychology. In 1960, disturbed by the unrest in the South during the civil rights movement, Dr. Schein began to apply for jobs at several colleges farther north, and ended up becoming a psychology professor at Gallaudet.

Dr. Schein’s experiences at Gallaudet gave him a lifelong fascination with deafness and deaf culture, and he made many close friends in the deaf community. He was the first to conduct a national study of the deaf population, and a similar study of the deaf-blind population. As director of Gallaudet’s Office of Psychological Research, he headed research projects to determine the extent of deafness in America, whether deaf drivers were really more dangerous, and other topics.

He left Gallaudet in 1968 to accept a deanship at the University of Cincinnati, and in 1970 relocated again, this time to head the Deafness Research and Training Center (DRTC) at New York University and teach sensory rehabilitation in NYU’s School of Education. In this capacity, Schein was active in setting up ASL classes for both deaf and hearing, and founded the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) to help ensure interpreter quality. He was made a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1976.

In 1986, he was awarded Gallaudet’s Powrie Vaux Doctor Chair, and three years later he was selected for the University of Alberta’s David Peikoff Chair of Deafness Studies. As of this writing, Dr. Schein is the only person to have held both the Doctor and Peikoff Chairs.

Dr. Schein left the Peikoff Chair in 1993. In retirement, he continued to be an active researcher, writer, and speaker on deafness and related subjects. Over the course of his life, he wrote 25 books and published over 200 refereed papers. He passed away in 2010.