Profile

I was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, where I also attended college. I started Temple University with an intention to major in music education (as a trumpet player). During my first semester, I enrolled in Introduction to Psychology and got a work-study job as a research assistant in a cognitive psychology lab. These experiences led me to change my major to psychology before that semester was over. In a Psychology as a Natural Science class the next semester, I was introduced to the field of Behavior Analysis (BA); the study of behavior as a natural science that emerged from the psychology of learning (the subdiscipline within psychology concerned primarily with the study of classical and operant conditioning). The rest, as they say, is history. After earning my B.A. in psychology from Temple, I entered the graduate program in Behavior Analysis at West Virginia University (Morgantown WV), where I earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. While completing my graduate degrees, I was introduced to and intrigued by the rapidly growing field of behavioral pharmacology (the union of behavior analysis and pharmacology). To gain training and experience in that area before securing a faculty position, I completed two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse Addiction Research Center in Baltimore, MD, and one year as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Center for Studies of Addiction.

Behavior analysts recognize that both nature and nurture shape behavior. We study both human and nonhuman behavior, seeking explanations in terms of empirically validated functional relations between individuals and their environments. Thus, although behavior analysts recognize the critical role of biological processes in determining behavior, we assert that environmental factors play an equally important role and strive to elucidate the ways in which they do so. Accordingly, I spend most of my time studying the impact of environmental events on the behavior of individuals, but with a healthy nod to behavioral neuroscience and the interaction of the two. Students working in my Laboratory for the Analysis of Behavior (LAB) have contributed to many different types of projects. Projects conducted with rats have included basic and translational research questions with theoretical importance in the experimental analysis of behavior and behavioral pharmacology (choice, discriminative functions of drugs, and resistance to change) as well as examinations of the behavioral pharmacology of nutraceuticals (Kava Kava, St. John’s Wort, and Valerian) and animal models of psychopathology (ADHD, Depression, and Anxiety). Studies conducted with human participants have included basic laboratory studies of judgment and decision-making and behavioral pharmacology (drug discrimination and reinforcer efficacy), translational projects involving contingency management interventions (for smoking reduction in college students), and applied research exploring pedagogy in higher-education.