Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Awardee
2003: Dr. Victor Laties
Dr. Victor Laties received his B.A. from Tufts and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. A postdoctoral year a Brown with Harold Schlosberg and Carl Pfaffmann introduced him to behavior analysis. A transforming event was helping to run two undergraduate rat labs with Rosemary Pierrel. These were based upon Keller and Schoenfeld’s Columbia model. He learned about operant conditioning with his students as together they read Principles of Psychology.
His first job was at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and it was there, in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology, that he started doing animal research, learning much from Bernie Weiss, a fellow Rochester graduate who had joined him at Hopkins. They ranged widely, studying pain measurement, heat reinforcement, human observing behavior, and various other types of schedule and stimulus control, usually but not always with an eye to usefulness in understanding the actions of behaviorally-important drugs. After moving together to Rochester’s medical school in 1965, they expanded their interests to behavioral toxicology. However Laties continued to emphasize behavioral pharmacologic questions in his research.
Laties became Secretary-Treasurer of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (SEAB) and Executive Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) in 1966. He had no idea then that the commitment was to be open ended. With no one else showing any interest in the job, he has been heavily involved in journal business affairs ever since, enjoying every minute, and also edited JEAB for four years in the mid-1970s. He retired in 1993 but remains actively engaged in managing the Web pages for the SEAB journals as well as taking care of his own department’s Web site.
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