34th Annual Conference Speakers

Dr. Kent A. Corso is a licensed clinical psychologist and board-certified behavior analyst. His career in suicidology began almost two decades ago while serving in the U.S. Air Force. Dr. Corso has researched, developed and evaluated suicide prevention programs across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Most recently, he developed PROSPER, an evidence-based suicide prevention and intervention program for medical professionals, administrators, elected officials, community members, and other stakeholders. Dr. Corso has published numerous peer-reviewed research
papers on suicide and is a leading expert in novel scientific methods and digital technologies for analyzing suicide.

It has been the mission of Kirk Kirby to incorporate the science of human behavior and Precision Teaching to help change the world. As the co-founder of TeamABA, Kirk has taken that mission to the forefront by creating one of the most unique companies in the world.

Kirk holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism from Virginia Union University, a Masters of Arts in English from Virginia Commonwealth University and a graduate certificate in Sports Psychology and Performance from Ashworth College. He is currently seeking a Psy.D. focusing on Sports and Performance Psychology from Ashford University.  The proud native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania started his career in behavior analysis over a decade ago by co-founding the Washington DC metropolitan area based SPARKS-ABA along with his wife, Beverly Kirby, BCBA, LBA and Soraya Dos Santos, BCBA, LBA.

After his collegiate and “cup of coffee” professional playing days were completed, Kirk continued to be involved in sports by coaching various levels of athletes in football, basketball, and baseball for over twenty five years. His passion for sports, Behavior Analysis, Precision Teaching, diversity within the field, and ABA program opportunities for Historically Black Colleges and Universities has the driven the entrepreneur to travel all over the country disseminating the science to all that will listen.

I was raised in southern Minnesota among Ukrainian Mennonite farmers when, in 1963, we moved to a small town west of Minneapolis, MN.  I graduated after an uneventful and uninspired high school career in 1966 and, following a short stint at St. Cloud State University, joined the Navy in 1968 just a step ahead of the draft.  Having served four years with First and Seventh Fleets on the guided missile frigate, U.S.S. Jouett, DLG-29, I was readmitted to State Cloud State University.  While in the Navy, I married a talented fashion designer who was finishing her training at the New York Institute of Fashion Technology.  Fifty-two years later and three kids to call our own, Nancy and I are now retired.

It was fortuitous that I returned to St. Cloud and that I chose a Psychology major.  There I found myself in a hotbed of radical behaviorists, the best of which were Gerald Mertens, Charles Boltock, and Bob Murphy.  While taking all the classes expected of a radical behaviorist, I began taking math classes from mathematicians where calculus, trigonometry, statistics, and linear algebra kept me working well into the night.

In 1976, Drake University accepted me into their experimental psychology graduate program where I began studies with Larry Alferink, William Klipec, Ken Lloyd, and Scott Wood, one of  B.F. Skinner’s biographers and most articulate proponents of radical behaviorism.  Larry Alferink brought me into his laboratory research where he was working on stimulus control and schedule-induced polydipsia (Alferink, L.A., Bartness, T.J. & Harder, S.R., 1980).  The work we were doing in schedule-induced responding led me to ask the ‘I wonder what would happen if..’ question. Specifically, will concurrent schedules of reinforcement generate the orderly functional relations predicted by matching law when applied to schedule-induced responses?  This became the basis for my Masters’s research.  With Bill Klipec, I participated in his peak shift experiments and multi-ply multiple schedule studies of behavioral contrast.  Additionally, Bill afforded me an opportunity to assist with studies of electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) in which we compare appetitive responses with ESB targeting that part of the brain responsible for appetitive responses.

Upon finishing graduate school, I took a position at the Cambridge Regional Human Services Center having been hired in the first wave of behavior analysts as part of a court-ordered Consent Decree.  I worked in this setting for about 15 years and during this time several colleagues and I published half a dozen papers on medication side-effects, the most important of these was a single case, longitudinal study of phenobarbital exacerbation of a preexisting maladaptive behavior partially suppressed by chlorpromazine and misinterpreted as chlorpromazine efficacy.  We also published studies on tardive dyskinesia and developed the first standardized instrument, the Dyskinesia Identification System: Condensed User Scale (DISCUS). 

I left my position at Cambridge in 1993 to work at the St. Croix River Education District (SCRED), an umbrella agency serving five school districts.  Our agency was responsible for supporting all special education services and, working with Stan Deno from the University of Minnesota, we put in place a CBM system to track reading, math, and writing for students grades K thru 8.  I developed the progress monitoring charts for this system and these charts remained in use after the program was sold to Western Psychological Services.  Over the years with SCRED my duties included training special education teachers who served children and youth with emotional and behavior disorders (some states refer to this category as SED instead of EBD), assisting teams with assessments, and piloting initial interventions set forth in behavioral support plans. I am most proud of my efforts to bring the Boys Town ‘Social Skills in Schools’ program to our districts and am grateful to see its procedures remain in use today.  After ten years I was asked to assume responsibility for the autism spectrum disorders services and I provided the same support to teachers, students, and parents as I did for our students needing instruction to develop new alternative behavior repertoires.

Over the years, I crossed paths with Og and the Standard Celeration Chart, meeting him for the first in 1976 when Jerry Mertens invited him to present his work to a gathering of talented high schoolers attending a summer science program.  When he began talking about first and second derivatives I was hooked.  I began understanding the Chart and its many uses in the early days of AOL when a group of PT-folk started a special interest group.  I believe Og either participated in that group or joined when Penn State hosted a similar listserv.  Owen White and Scott Born opened new possibilities for me when Owen decided to share his Excel template.  As Scott began modifying the template, I saw the possibility of adding program supports to the template though much of the Template’s present structure is due to Scott.  I am not now nor was I ever a good programmer, but I will stick with a problem until I get it solved and that effort has brought the template to version 13-10 and will be released soon.  I have been most grateful to our community of Charters for their support and feedback.