Elizabeth Kyonka
University of New England
Dr. Kyonka began her undergraduate studies in cognitive neuroscience but was drawn to the clear operational definitions and varied experimental tactics of behaviour analysis. In graduate school, she conducted research with Dr. Randolph Grace at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her attempts to devise a task that was too complex for pigeons to learn failed, so she submitted a doctoral thesis on the convergence of temporal discrimination and response allocation in concurrent chains, earning her PhD in psychology in 2009. As a faculty member in the Behavior Analysis program at West Virginia University, Dr. Kyonka supervised five masters’ theses and three dissertations. With her students, she has published empirical research on choice, interval timing and stimulus control in journals such as the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Learning & Behavior and the Psychological Record. Substantial efforts of many talented students to challenge their capacity to adapt still have not produced a task that is too complex for pigeons to learn, but all of her former graduate students are still active in behaviour analysis, anyway. Dr. Kyonka recently returned to the southern hemisphere to take up a position at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, where she hopes to promote the expansion of behaviour analytic research, teaching and practice throughout Australia.