Director
Randolph Grace, Ph.D.
(2008-2011)
University of Canterbury
Randolph Grace was originally trained as an electrical engineer, and received an S.B. from MIT in 1983. Later he discovered that pigeons were more interesting than computers, and completed his Ph.D. in Psychology (1995) at the University of New Hampshire, where his mentors included Tony Nevin and William Baum. He is currently Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Co-President of the Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior (SQAB). He teaches courses in statistics and the experimental analysis of behavior, and has been voted ‘best lecturer’ three times by the University of Canterbury student association in recent years. The major goal of his research has been to understand the processes involved in choice, typically with pigeons responding in simple behavioral tasks for food reinforcement. His approach has been to develop and test quantitative models for “steady state” behavior - situations in which subjects are trained with a particular set of contingencies until responding stabilizes - and then attempt to extend those models to other behavioral phenomena such as resistance to change. More recently, he has been studying choice in transition, and developed models for acquisition phenomena. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and has received a number of awards for his research, including New Investigator awards from Divisions 3 and 25 of the APA, and the Outstanding Dissertation award from Division 25.