A. Charles Catania, professor of psychology, is retiring at the end of the spring 2008 semester after serving in the department for 35 years. The department will host his retirement celebration on Thursday, May 29, 4-8 p.m. on the 7th floor of the Albin O. Kuhn Library. If you plan to attend, RSVP to Elaine O’Heir at oheir@umbc.edu by Tuesday, May 20.
A. Charles Catania, professor of psychology, is retiring at the end of the spring 2008 semester after serving in the department for 35 years. The department will host his retirement celebration on Thursday, May 29, 4-8 p.m. on the 7th floor of the Albin O. Kuhn Library. If you plan to attend, RSVP to Elaine O’Heir at oheir@umbc.edu by Tuesday, May 20.
Catania began his teaching career as an undergraduate teaching assistant in an Experimental Psychology laboratory course at Columbia College in 1956-1957 and taught his first regular course while a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in 1961-1962. After teaching and serving as chair of the Department of Psychology at the University Heights campus of New York University, he came to UMBC in the fall of 1973.
The courses he has taught here have included the Psychology of Learning at both graduate and undergraduate levels. For a number of years he team-taught the undergraduate learning course with his late colleague, Eliot Shimoff, and together they developed a number of computer simulations and other computer exercises for the learning course and for introductory psychology.
Catania has conducted both human and pigeon laboratory research since his days as a graduate student in the early 1960’s, with almost continuous research funding from the mid-1960’s through the late 1980’s from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has been privileged to host visitors from Norway, Brazil, Japan, Spain and Italy who have come to UMBC to work in his laboratory, and he conducted other international collaborative research in Wales during a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship.
He has published many professional articles, chapters and books, including an undergraduate text in learning, and has served and continues to serve on various editorial boards. He has held offices in several professional organizations, including the presidency of the Association for Behavior Analysis. In collaboration with colleagues at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, he established the Master’s track in Applied Behavior Analysis within the Human Services Psychology program, and served as its director and later co-director through spring 2007.
During the current academic year he has co-edited the autobiography of Fred S. Keller, the teacher with whom, in 1954-1955, he took the undergraduate course in introductory psychology that got him started in his career. At My Own Pace has just been published (Sloan Publishing, May 2008). With Koji Hori, who is visiting UMBC on a sabbatical leave from Rikkyo University in Tokyo, he has been having regular discussions in preparation for Hori’s Japanese translation of his learning book.
This month Catania will attend meetings of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior and of the Association for Behavior Analysis and will accept a Distinguished Career Award for his work on verbal behavior. He expects to remain professionally active in his retirement; his writing plans include a book on verbal behavior and even some research papers based on data obtained during the years when his UMBC laboratory was still active.
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