New England Teachers of Psychology (NETOP)

Simon Barak Caine

S. Barak Caine collected his first data that would be published at the age of 16, on brain mechanisms underlying attention to rewards in turtles studied in Skinner boxes. While completing his bachelor’s degree in Biological Basis of Behavior, he co-authored several articles in the departments of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He then became a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of George F. Koob at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, a world leader in the Neurobiology of Addiction and the current Director of the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, National Institutes of Health. The first Caine and Koob research report was published in Science, in 1993, and the themes of his basic research on addiction remains faithful to that early effort. Caine’s two most influential findings were published in his two favorite journals, the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the Journal of Neuroscience, the latter being voted a “Must Read” by the “Faculty of 1000” peer review committee. Both articles demonstrated, via complementary approaches, that the abuse potential of cocaine is dependent upon its increasing dopamine in brain synapses.

Although Caine has numerous research awards, his self-reported “most important contribution” is to teaching and mentoring, something he learned from his own teachers and mentors George F. Koob and Nancy K. Mello. Caine directs several courses at Harvard University, including “Brain Mechanisms of Psychiatric Disorders and Drug Actions,” “Memory Systems of the Brain,” and a graduate-level seminar entitled “Dopamine.” Caine is most gratified by the Certificates for Distinction in Teaching earned for every semester that he led a Neurobiology seminar at Harvard University, eight so far, based on the students’ evaluations of his efforts and excellence as a teacher.

Amy C. Fineburg (she/her) is the Director of AP Psychology for College Board. She earned her PhD in educational psychology from the University of Alabama researching teacher explanatory style. She started her career last century as a high school psychology teacher in Birmingham, Alabama (originally land of the Muskogee Creek Nation). She taught for 14 years before spending 10 years as a high school and then district administrator, where she advocated for teachers of all subjects to use psychology in teaching and learning. She served president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA Division 2) in 2020. She has been a part of several major projects and events where she has advocated for high-quality psychology instruction and training, including chairing the 2011 National Standards for High School Psychology Curricula revision committee and co-chairing the 2017 APA National Summit for High School Psychology Education. She has written teaching resources packages for AP and on-level psychology textbooks. She is a 2019 alumnae of the APA’s Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology (LIWP), and she serves on its Advisory Committee and as Chair of the LIWP Professional Development Committee.

Maria Vita teaches Advanced Placement (AP) psychology at Penn Manor High School in Millersville, Pennsylvania. She started the AP program at her school and has expanded it, requiring additional staff. For the past 19 years, she has maintained a laboratory with live rats for ethical research in learning. In 2013-14, she served on the American Psychological Association's TOPSS committee as member-at-large and she was the TOPSS Committee chair in 2018. She has taught AP Psychology for 14 years and has been involved in the AP Reading since 2011. At the Reading she has been a Reader, Table Leader, and currently serves as a Question Leader. Maria was honored to be the recipient of the APA TOPSS Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012 and a finalist in 2019 for Pennsylvania State Teacher of the Year.

Alan Feldman is a teacher of AP Psychology at Glen Rock High School in Glen Rock, NJ. Since 1993, Alan has taught dozens of one-day and week-long AP Psychology workshops for the College Board. He has been an AP reader continuously since the exam’s inception in 1992 and a table leader since 2003. He is a former member of the AP psychology test development committee (2001-2005) as well as a recipient of the 1994 Moffet Teaching Award for high school psychology, the 2003 Princeton University Distinguished Secondary Teaching award and the 2015 APA TOPSS Charles T. Blair-Broeker Excellence in Teaching Award.