Avshalom Caspi is perhaps best known for his work on factors relating to the development of antisocial behavior in adolescents. He holds appointments as a professor in the Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre affiliated with the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London and as professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he co-directs the Developmental Program on Personality and Psychopathology.

A graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1981), Caspi earned his M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. in developmental psychology (1986) from Cornell University. He taught at Harvard (1986-1989) before joining the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1989. He began a concurrent appointment with the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London in 1997. Since 1991 he has also served as associate editor of the Journal of Personality, and in 2000 he began a six-year term as a member of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development. He is a co-author of Sex Differences in Antisocial Behaviour: Conduct Disorder, Delinquency, and Violence in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study (2001).

Caspi has pursued research in three areas: developmental psychology/psychopathology, focusing on the origins, continuity, and change of individual differences in both normal and abnormal psychological traits; social psychology and psychiatry, focusing on social inequalities and mental health; and personality psychology, focusing on the integration of methods and concepts from differential psychology with those in epidemiology to better understand how and why personality differences shape health-risk behaviors.