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Frank L. Schmidt was born on a dairy farm outside Louisville, Kentucky, on April 29, 1944, the oldest of six children to Swiss German parents with a grade-school education. At his first faculty job at Michigan State University, he met John (Jack) Hunter, with whom he began a prolific, impactful collaboration that lasted until Hunter’s 2002 death. Together, they invented the methods of psychometric meta-analysis. He believed that the goal of science is to establish universal principles. Schmidt and Hunter’s pioneering development of validity generalization (VG) methods showed that statistical artifacts were responsible for study-to-study differences in cognitive ability tests’ validities. Schmidt’s influential articles included research on selection, bias, utility, job performance, employee engagement, smoking cessation, psychopathology, and corporate social responsibility. But psychometric meta-analysis was his most far …