John L. Kennedy

John L. Kennedy, born in 1913, established the Systems Research Laboratory at RAND (which became the Systems Research Center) in the early 1950's.  The original mission of the laboratory was to study the effective operation of complex man-machine systems, which required an understanding of group rather than individual behavior.   From 1958 to 1966 Kennedy served as chair of the Psychology Department at Princeton, and later taught at California State University in Northridge CA.  He died in 1984.  Photo courtesy of the RAND Archives.