Goldiamond, Israel

Israel (Izzy) Goldiamond was born on November 1, 1919, in a little village in Russia near Kiev, in the Ukraine. His family immigrated to the United States in 1923 when he was 3 years old and settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he spent most of his childhood. After graduating from Brooklyn College with a bachelor's degree in English, he enlisted in the army and served during World War II in military intelligence until his discharge in November of 1945.

He and Betty Johnson married in February 1946, and they moved to California so that he could attend the University of California in Berkeley. With the goal of eventually entering the graduate program in psychology, he proceeded to take the necessary undergraduate courses in that subject. However, after a year and a half, an opportunity came for him to work at the Chicago Institute of Design, known as the “New Bauhaus.” This occurred as an outgrowth of his life-long interest and considerable skill in cartooning and drawing. The Goldiamonds moved with the full expectation that this new path would lead him to a career as a designer. However, in the fall of 1948, he realized he preferred to study and work in the field of psychology.

It was at this time that he enrolled at the University of Chicago. However, still not having sufficient undergraduate credits to qualify for the psychology graduate program, he again took courses as a general student. When he finally qualified for the graduate program, he never looked back, not even bothering with a master's degree, but going straight for his PhD. This he achieved in 1955 when his sharply honed 27-page dissertation, a psychophysical study in the field of visual perception, was submitted and accepted.

At this point, Goldiamond still had not been introduced to behavioral approaches, a subject then avoided at the university. It was Howard Hunt who introduced him to operant conditioning, but it was his first teaching job at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale that turned out to be fortuitous. It was there that he met Nate Azrin, who had studied with Skinner at Harvard. A close and lasting friendship was formed between the two around long conversations about behavior analysis; Goldiamond immediately grasped how the operant paradigm could be used for purposes of experimental analysis and replication. Fred Keller, Murray Sidman, Ogden Lindsley, and Charles Ferster were also early influences.

The operant paradigm became the conceptual framework for Goldiamond's work as he moved to Arizona State, Johns Hopkins, the Institute for Behavior Research (as director), full circle back to the University of Chicago as full professor in 1968, and eventually as professor emeritus in psychology and psychiatry. He taught the university's first courses in behavior analysis and programming.

Goldiamond's contributions not only included his work in basic behavioral research and its applications but also involved the very founding of the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA). In 1968, he served on the first editorial board of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and he, with Jerry Mertens, organized the very first ABA conference in 1974. An outcome of the conference was the formation of the Midwest Association for Behavior Analysis (MABA), of which Goldiamond became the first president. MABA evolved into the Association for Behavior Analysis in 1976, with Azrin its first president and Goldiamond as its second.

...