It’s apt that Mary Jane Weiss, Ph.D., BCBA-D, LABA, Dean of the Institute for Applied Behavioral Science at Endicott College, has built her career at a college known for strong internships—it was an internship, after all, that led her to study ABA, or Applied Behavior Analysis, as a college student.
ABA, in the broadest sense, is the science of human behavior. It functions on the premise that the human condition can be improved through behavioral change, which starts with the observable relationship between behavior and the environment. While it is a relevant and practical approach across all humans (and even non-humans!), it has most recently been predominantly used on a professional level in autism service provision.
The field of ABA, however, has wide application, Weiss explained. In Endicott’s master’s degree program, for example, students can add concentrations in autism, child clinical, mental health, sustainability, ABA in public schools, and organizational behavior management. Graduates of the program can work in health care, education, professional development, and business contexts.
For Weiss, the most meaningful part of the practice is that each approach is determined by the individual themselves—that it’s essentially a partnership among the professional, the individual, and the people in their lives.
She’s taken her love for this collaborative approach and built an impressive career. Previously the Director of Research and Training at the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center at Rutgers University, she now leads Endicott’s program, as well as serving on the Scientific Council of the Organization for Autism Research. She serves as Vice President of the board of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, is a member of the editorial board of Behavior Analysis in Practice, and is a member of the ABA Ethics Hotline. Additionally, she is an advisor to the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. She served as a past president of the Autism Special Interest Group of the Association for Behavior Analysis International.
We sat down with Weiss to talk about her journey to becoming a well-known name in the field of ABA and how Endicott is helping the industry discover its next evolution.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you come to study ABA?
Weiss: I was raised in Long Island, NY, and I was really interested in psychology during my undergraduate years. I got my undergraduate degree at Marquette, and as part of that program, I did an internship in a clinic for ADHD. Two parts of that experience really affected me. One was realizing how powerful environment can be, and how changing someone’s environment can really increase an individual's quality of life. These were children who were largely unsuccessful in the educational system, had been thrown out of daycare and classrooms, considered unmanageable, and were really having difficulty regulating their own behavior. I learned that all of that was highly changeable, and that small adjustments in how people interacted with those children could radically transform their ability to navigate the world and access opportunities.
The second is that you could also change these individuals’ experiences within their families so that there are more positive interactions between parents and children, between siblings, less chaos in the family environment, and much more positivity. I became really interested in empowering families to change their lives and in supporting family members who needed slightly different arrays of environmental supports to thrive. So, when I was looking to go to graduate school, I looked for programs in psychology and clinical psychology that would have that behavioral framework.
When did you start teaching?
Weiss: As part of my Ph.D. program at Rutgers, I taught a fieldwork course. It was a hybrid role: we did some training on how to teach and work with individuals on the autism spectrum, and we also ran a more topical class, covering ABA and the procedures we were using. I really enjoyed working with students to develop their paraprofessional skills, which sparked my interest in working in higher education settings.
How did you come to Endicott?
Weiss: I loved everything I was doing at the time, but when an opportunity came up at Endicott, it was unique in a couple of ways that were very appealing to me. I wanted to work in a context where we were granting degrees in behavior analysis rather than folding ABA into existing psychology departments, and I also wanted to work in a doctoral program in applied behavior analysis. Since that was something Endicott was planning, I could be a part of that initial team.
I was also super interested in online instruction. This was well before COVID. I’m fond of saying that we were doing online instruction before it was cool or necessary. Endicott was already offering online instruction and was looking to bring in additional members of the administrative team to develop those programs further and teach in that format.
What drew you to online instruction so specifically?
Weiss: The biggest benefit for our field was that it reduced barriers to getting degrees in higher education, and I’m really proud of that to this day. We’re attracting students who thought they couldn’t do this, for reasons like work schedules or family life. Here, we have created a program that serves people who have so much to offer the field, and our job as instructional designers and instructors is to make this a high-quality educational experience and to infuse active instructional opportunities and high-quality discussions into the course, regardless of the format. I think it's created an incredibly vibrant and varied intellectual experience for everyone.
Do you know why Endicott decided to get involved in such a niche degree program?
Weiss: Well, that's interesting. While I’ve been in the ABA field, it’s gone from a very small group of people who did this kind of work for many, many years to a much larger healthcare industry. When we were given approval for insurance reimbursement starting around 2008, it created a need to quickly train a large workforce to meet this need within our country. That created real challenges with workforce depth and breadth. The openness to new models at Endicott meant we were a little bit ahead of some other colleges that were seeing that landscape and imagining what offerings would meet the coming need. Some of that predates me being at Endicott, but I have certainly enjoyed being part of that mentality and that commitment.
So, ABA is a relatively young discipline in terms of widespread practice. What has it been like to watch it grow so quickly?
Weiss: Like with every field of study, the science evolves. The profession evolves. And the history of any field potentially has a haunting presence within it. The history of intervention for autism or for developmental disabilities contains the use of procedures that are no longer appropriate, and that’s natural. Some of what we may be teaching students today will be presented in 20, 30, or 40 years as no longer appropriate. That’s part of the art of teaching behavior analysis—making sure we cover those historical issues in a way that reflects the field’s evolution, its contemporary values, and the need to align its current practice with those values. The momentum in the field has been remarkable, and the enthusiasm of the provider community to ensure that our practices reflect those values has been substantial and impressive.
Where do you see ABA going in the near future?
Weiss: There’s been quite a movement within the field in the last few years that has spotlighted our focus on humane and compassionate intervention. Interest has been resurgent in those foundational values, an increased focus in our research literature, and an integration of them into our teaching and training of practitioners.
Your research is relevant to that evolution, correct?
Weiss: Absolutely. Most of the work I’ve done over the last few years has focused on practitioners’ interpersonal skills, specifically collaboration, compassionate care, and cultural responsiveness. Essentially, these are the non-technical skills. It’s imperative that behavior analysts be taught in the technical side of our science, but it’s also important that we have skills to be effective at communicating, supporting, and partnering with the individuals we’re working with. A number of my doctoral students have really taken on these hard-to-define areas—values-based movements to ensure that our work is universally ethical, humane, and compassionate. We’re looking at how we operationally define those things. What does it really mean to be compassionate as a behavior analyst? How does that manifest itself in practice? How do we deliver performance-based feedback for that? It has been difficult but also really rewarding to make some progress in the definition, measurement, teaching, and training of those skill sets.
I’m getting the impression that this research—and perhaps Endicott as an organization and even you individually—is a bit of a big deal in the field today. What would you say to that?
Weiss: Well, thank you! I think most folks don’t quite understand how big a deal the Endicott program is in the field. We are at the top of the list. We have these incredibly well-respected, top-of-the-line people who want to be doctoral advisors in our program or teach one of our doctoral classes. People ask me how we became involved with some of these big names, and honestly, they called me. It is wonderful to be in contexts where there is so much continual buzz about what we are doing at Endicott.
Why is that? What's so special about Endicott?
Weiss: It’s the work that the students and faculty are doing. We are working in cutting-edge areas that are super impactful and being noticed in the field as important examples of moving us forward. In any big-ticket item or conversation in the field, we’ve got faculty and students who are really making a mark and meeting that need. And our graduates contribute to that as well. Some of our Ph.D. graduates are getting positions at clinical centers of excellence at higher education institutions. They’re now directing some graduate programs. We just admitted our 12th cohort to the Ph.D. program. And so we have many years of graduates now; they’re far and wide in terms of the impact they’re having on the field. We’ve created something really amazing. Our incredible community is small but mighty.