Alumni, colleagues and friends have initiated the Dr. Jack Michael Graduate Student Mentored Scholarship Fund to honor Dr. Jack Michael’s legacy in the field of behavior analysis and to ensure that conceptual issues in behavior analysis continue to be a focus of behavior analytic training at Western Michigan University.
The fund will support a graduate student scholarship in the Department of Psychology at WMU.
MAKE A GIFT
If you would like to make a gift to the Dr. Jack Michael Graduate Student Mentored Scholarship Fund, but prefer not to share your personal information online, please download our printable giving form to send via mail.
Dr. Jack Michael’s most substantive contributions to the field of behavior analysis include:
- A well-defined conceptualization of motivation that can be applied in any setting to improve human behavior
- A career in teaching Skinner’s Verbal Behavior that has greatly influenced university teaching and research programs
- An emphasis on behavioral treatments for language acquisition that has resulted in autism treatment clinics in the US and internationally
- Read the ABAI article entitled, "A Bibliographic Tribute to Jack Michael."
Dr. Jack Michael's Bio
Dr. Jack Michael is professor emeritus of psychology at Western Michigan University (WMU), where he taught in the behavior analysis program for 36 years. While at the University of Kansas in 1955, his first academic position after graduating from UCLA, he was influenced by B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior and, for the rest of his career, advanced behavior analysis through his teaching and writing. He held faculty positions at the University of Houston, Arizona State University, and WMU, where he taught generations of leaders in the field of behavior analysis and made pioneering applied and conceptual contributions.
He was one of the founders of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, and served as its president in 1979. Dr. Michael has received numerous awards for his achievements, including a distinguished faculty scholar award from WMU, distinguished teaching awards from the American Psychological Association and WMU, and lifetime service awards from ABAI and the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. In 2012, he was the first recipient of an award named in his honor by the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group affiliated with ABAI. Dr. Michael retired from WMU in 2003, after 48 years of teaching.