ABAI 2025 Outstanding Mentor – Deisy das Graças de Souza

Deisy das Graças de Souza received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), mentored by João Claudio Todorov and Carolina Bori. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she worked with A. Charles Catania, and at 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. Her early career was characterized by publications on basic research on avoidance and choice behavior and she has been currently working on social behavior of nonhuman animals. Later, Dr. de Souza turned her attention to stimulus control, a topic in which she has made experimental, applied, and conceptual analyses of phenomena involving stimulus equivalence, verbal behavior (especially reading and writing), and recombination of behavioral repertoires. 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 research agencies (FAPESP, CNPq). She has an extensive record of master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral supervisions. Among her leadership positions are service as president of the Associação Brasileira de Psicologia, member of the Executive Council of ABAI, and as co-editor (Portuguese) of Acta Comportamentalia and editor of Revista Brasileira de Análise do Comportamento/Brazilian Journal of Behavior Analysis. She is an ABAI’s Fellow since 2018 and She received the Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Award, from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis (SABA), in 2022.