I graduated from McGill University with a PhD in Neuroscience in 2012 but with no desire to continue down the traditional academic path. After a long period of introspection and reading, especially in the fields of personality and social psychology, I came to the conclusion that although I “knew myself” better, I still had no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And I think a lot of us are wandering out there thinking the same thing.

What I do know about myself:

• I love new challenges and steep learning curves.
• I love being independent.
• I love asking questions about nature and discovering the answers, either through experiment or reading. My current obsession is the genetic basis of individual differences (hence this study).
• I love sharing this knowledge with others that share similar interests.
• I self-identify as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Based on all the above, I originally planned to launch an app that would report people's personality traits based on their DNA. However, after months of working on a prototype and reading the relevant literature I came to the conclusion that none of the variants found so far could predict a person’s personality traits better than a horoscope can. So I decided to change direction and instead lead my own research project, gathering data from individuals with genotyping data in order to study the genetics of personality type.

Why use Personality Type and not the more traditional Big 5 Personality Traits?

• Did I mention I like to be different and buck trends?
• The theory behind personality type just “makes sense” with my understanding of neuroscience, psychology, evolution, genetics, anthropology, ecology, ethology, decision-making research, etc. It would take a lot for me to explain my intuition to you, so you’ll just have to take this on faith, or contact me for more details if you are interested (warning: you might get back links to lots and lots of disparate papers from lots of different fields that I believe are all connected).

Personality Type and Me

The most powerful thing about learning about personality type for me was finally being able to feel at peace with myself, my preferences and all my quirks. You see, while I knew what makes me, ME, a lot of times people (and more broadly, “society”) made me feel that what I thought were my strengths were actually hindrances to “fitting in” and being successful—especially as a woman who prefers a good scientific paper or debate over pretty much anything else that women are supposed to enjoy. I often felt that being me wasn’t good enough. So in a way, I was relieved to discover that there were other people very much like me out there! I felt validated and understood for the first time, and as a result experienced a huge increase in self-esteem and confidence. I now know that I have all the tools necessary to define my own life goals and set my own path, even if it happens to be a path less trodden.

My main objective with this research project is to bring scientific validity, reliability and credibility to the study of personality types and hopefully catalyze much needed academic research on this topic. It is my belief that a better understanding of personality would help solve many scientific enigmas, as well as helping people make better life decisions.