Janet E. Helms

Life and career

Janet E. Helms was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She is the second child and first girl in a family of seven children. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology from the University of Missouri. Helms initially decided to be a math major because of her father. However, from a young age, Helms knew she wanted to be a psychologist. She said in an interview, "I decided—actually in second grade—that I would be a psychologist and work with autistic children because I read about it in a magazine and that sounded like something good to do." Eventually, she became a psychology major.

Helms attended the University of Missouri as a full-time student and held a full-time job. It was during this time in Helms' life where her interest in racism and multicultural issues began. With the support of her family, Helms graduated with her B.A. in psychology in two years. Subsequently, she received her master's degree in two years at the same institution. Helms' master's thesis focused on attrition and the test scores of black students. She received her Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Iowa State University in 1975.

Helms accepted a position as an assistant professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Soon after Helms found out about a position she was more interested in through a friend. From 1977 to 1981 she had a full-time academic position in the psychology department at Southern Illinois University, where she began to think of race as something she could address through her research. Helms was always told from colleagues that race wasn't a real topic, so at Southern she began to develop the idea that race is a real topic and can be studied through empirical data. During her time there she could tell there wasn't much literature on race, so she soon published an article focusing on black women. Then she was invited to be on the editorial board for the Journal of Counseling Psychology. This invitation put Helms a little more at ease about her research on race, because she believed the people who invited her to be on the board knew her research was under the area of racial and cultural diversity, and she had confidence that the area was growing. Next, she worked at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1981 to 1999. She started there as an assistant professor, then was promoted to a full-time professor. While at Maryland she became the co-director of the counseling psychology program and an affiliate for the Women's Study Program. Helms also provided psychological services to clients in a private practice.

In 2000, Helms accepted a tenured faculty position at Boston College where she is the Augustus Long Professor of Counseling Psychology.