Dr. A. Charles Catania is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose master's in applied behavior analysis he co-founded. He is a former president of ABAI and Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, and has served as editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. He started his career in Fred Keller's psychology course, and was a teaching assistant in Nat Schoenfeld's experimental psychology sequence. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he conducted postdoctoral research in Skinner's pigeon laboratory. In 1957 Dr. Catania took a seminar on verbal behavior taught by Fred Keller, Nat Schoenfeld, and Ralph Hefferline. The course began with Skinner's William James lectures and then, when Verbal Behavior was published midway into the semester, compared the older and newer versions. Dr. Catania's early work on learning without words was highly appropriate preparation for teaching courses on verbal behavior, because it made features of verbal behavior stand out clearly. Indeed, one function of his textbook, Learning, is to integrate the topics of nonverbal and verbal behavior.
Back to Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Award
