Dave W. Schaal
Stanford University
Dave Schaal discovered behaviorism as a student at St. Cloud State University, where he also learned to program a computer and do pigeon experiments. He was accepted into the EAB program at the University of Florida, where he learned to think a little and picked up a good trade (behavioral pharmacology) from Dr. Marc Branch, one that would result in a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota under Dr. Travis Thompson. There he was encouraged to consider how genetic and biological variables contribute to normal and aberrant behavior. Dave joined the psychology faculty of West Virginia University, where thanks to his colleagues and students he was a reasonably successful researcher and teacher. For some reason, he moved to the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University in 2002, where some of his ideas about biological variables became useful to him. Dave helped Drs. Timberlake and Steinmetz edit a special issue of Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) devoted to behavioral neuroscience, and he got to serve as editor for behavioral neuroscience for JEAB for a few years. A biomedical device company offered him a job in 2006, so he left academia and now he writes about radiosurgery. Today the great blessings of his life include his loving wife and family, his love of music and fiction, and the fact that his ABAI friends still let him come to this meeting.