Israel Goldiamond
Israel Goldiamond was a professor emeritus in psychiatry and psychology and a pioneer in the field of behavioral psychology. A leader in the experimental analysis of behavior, Goldiamond developed new methods to assess animal and human behaviors and in applying that knowledge to human behavior. His research led to new and very effective methods of altering problematic or harmful behaviors such as overeating, smoking, stuttering and phobic behavior.
Born Nov. 1, 1919, in the Ukraine, Goldiamond came to the United States at age 3. He received his BA from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1942, and then served in the U.S. Army until 1945. He entered graduate school at Chicago in 1948 and worked as a research assistant until he completed his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1955. He served on the psychology faculty at Southern Illinois University from 1955 to 1960 and taught at Arizona State from 1960 to 1963. From 1963 to 1968, he served as associate director and then director of the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Md., and as a neuropsychiatry consultant at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. From 1966 to 1968, he served on the psychiatry faculty at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, as associate professor and then professor of behavior analysis. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1968 as Professor in Psychiatry and Psychology. He also was Director of the Behavior Analysis Research Laboratory and a member of the Committee on Human Nutrition & Nutritional Biology.
The author of more than 60 scientific articles, Goldiamond was a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association, and he served as president, from 1977 to 1978, of the Association for Behavior Analysis. He also served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals and on the APA's Board on Social and Ethical Responsibility in Psychology. He died at his home of cancer at the age of 76.