Presents the obituary of Sarnoff A. Mednick (1928 -2015). Sarnoff A. Mednick was considered among the most important figures in psychopathology research in his generation. He pioneered the high-risk research design and made numerous contributions to our understanding of creativity and of the origins of schizophrenia and criminality. The son of Jewish immigrants, Mednick was born on January 27, 1928, and was raised in the Bronx in New York City, New York. He earned a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1948 and a master's degree from Columbia University. In 1954, he earned his doctorate in psychology from Northwestern University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, he was appointed an instructor at Harvard University and then became a visiting assistant research professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1958 -1959). In 1968, he became a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he taught until 1977, when he joined the faculty at the University of Southern California until his retirement in August 2008. Mednick, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Southern California, died of natural causes on April 10, 2015, in Toledo, Ohio. He was 87.