Deisy das Graças de Souza
Universidade Federal de São Carlos
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Dr. Deisy das Graças de Souza received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the Universidade de São Paulo in 1981. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she worked with A. Charles Catania, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, where she worked with William J. McIlvane. Throughout her career, she has been a member of the Department of Psychology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, where she attained the rank of professor in 2005. Dr. de Souza’s contributions are impressive in quality, quantity, and range. Her early career was characterized by important publications on basic laboratory analyses of signaled and unsignaled avoidance and of choice behavior. When serious allergies forced her out of the animal lab, Dr. de Souza turned her attention to stimulus control, an area in which she has made seminal experimental, applied, and conceptual analyses of phenomena involving exclusion and stimulus equivalence. Findings from her human laboratory studies were taken quickly into the field to facilitate reading and writing skills among young Brazilian children who were falling behind in school primarily due to reading deficits. The collective impact of this work is evidenced not only by the many publications it has generated in major outlets in Brazil and internationally, but also by its history of funding from Brazil’s most highly competitive federal research agency (FAPESP, CNPq). Dr. de Souza is widely respected as an inspirational teacher who has made essential contributions to the growth and development of her department, particularly as a mentor of graduate and postdoctoral students. Among her many leadership positions are service as president of the Associação Brasileira de Psicologia and as editor of Revista Brasileira de Análise do Comportamento.