Description

 

SORRY! THE TOUR IS SOLD OUT!!!

 

• WHEN: May 27, 2022, 3-5 pm*

• WHERE: Campus of Harvard University**, Cambridge, MA. Roundtrip bus transportation provided from the Seaport District (Boston). 

• WHAT: The B. F. Skinner Foundation presents an exclusive tour of Harvard University with Dave Palmer, Sara Schechner, and Julie Vargas! Don’t miss a unique opportunity to learn about Skinner’s years at Harvard; the people, places, and ideas that inspired and influenced him. Participants will visit William James Hall, follow Skinner’s footsteps around Harvard Yard, and tour the Scientific Instruments Collection at Harvard. 30-minute outdoor reception after the tour, with refreshments***.  

* Limited to 45 participants. Please limit your purchase to four tickets. For the event cancellation policy, click here. 

**Tour participants will have to follow all COVID-19 protocols implemented by Harvard. 

*** All tour details, including bus pick-up and drop-off locations, contact phone numbers, and other arrangements will be emailed to the address provided during the checkout no later than 5 business days prior to the event.

About the presenters:

Dr. David C. Palmer earned bachelor’s degrees in geology and English in 1969, but he immediately abandoned all pretense of getting a responsible job. He stumbled on the book Walden Two and spent the next decade on a soap box talking about Skinner, trying to start an experimental community, and reading the rest of the Skinner canon. Eventually he despaired of saving the world and entered graduate school in behavior analysis under John Donahoe at the University of Massachusetts. His main preoccupation in graduate school was extending Skinner’s interpretations of complex behavior. In particular, he wondered how behavior analysis could explain memory and language, and he has spent the rest of his professional career on the same question. He is the co-author, with Donahoe, of Learning and Complex Behavior, a book that attempts to integrate behavior analysis with physiology and to embed the field in the context of the broader study of selectionism. In 2018, Palmer retired from 30 years of teaching statistics and behavior analysis at Smith College, but he continues to teach verbal behavior in the graduate program at Western New England University.

Sara Schechner, PhD, is the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. She is a historian of science, specializing in material culture and the history of astronomy. At Harvard, she is a Lecturer on History of Science in the History of Science Department and has been on the faculty of the Museum Studies program. Schechner earned degrees in physics and the history and philosophy of science from Harvard and Cambridge. Before returning to Harvard’s History of Science Department, Schechner was chief curator at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and curated exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society. Her books include Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (1997), Time and Time Again: How Science and Culture Shape the Past, Present, and Future (2014) and Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (2015, with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, and Sarah Carter). Schechner’s research, teaching, and exhibition work has earned her many awards. In her spare time, Schechner is an award-winning quilt artist and enjoys Scottish country dancing. She lives in a historic house in West Newton, Massachusetts, which is on the National Register and has an archaeological site in her back yard.

Dr. Julie Vargas, B. F. Skinner’s daughter, is one of the founders of the B. F. Skinner Foundation. She received her bachelor’s in music from Radcliffe College, a master’s in music education from Columbia University, and a PhD in educational research from the University of Pittsburgh. She taught 3rd and 4th grade before becoming a faculty member at West Virginia University where she taught practicing and prospective teachers for over 35 years. Dr. Vargas is a former president of the Association for Behavior Analysis International and one of the founding editors of The Behavior Analyst. She is the author of Behavior Analysis for Effective Teaching. Dr. Vargas is currently Chief Science Officer and Chairman of the Board of the B. F. Skinner Foundation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.