John Donahoe, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences, died January 8, 2026.
While earning a BS in chemistry from Rutgers University, Donahoe was introduced to the science of behavior by Daniel Lehrman, an assistant professor of psychology at that time. He decided to pursue a doctorate in experimental psychology with a secondary concentration in neurophysiology at the T. H. Morgan School of Biological Sciences, University of Kentucky.
In 1958 upon receiving his doctorate, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. He developed two laboratories—one in human learning, the area of his doctoral dissertation, and the other in animal learning.
The analysis of his dissertation data had required him to learn to program a mainframe digital computer, a resource that had just then become available to university researchers. As a result, he was also offered a joint appointment in Computer Science, where he acquired further skills that proved essential in later work—writing computer programs for operant experiments and for neural-network simulations with José Burgos. Donahoe was also introduced to electro-mechanical switching circuits by Fogle Clark, which enabled him to use operant chambers for his research. He eventually focused his research entirely on animal learning.
Later he gained further experience in neuroscience, especially electrophysiology, while on a sabbatical at the Center for Brain Research at the University of Rochester.
In 1968 Donahoe received a telephone call from former doctoral student John Ayres informing him that the University of Massachusetts was seeking a faculty member with neuroscience experience. Donahoe was offered the position in what is now the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences where he spent the remainder of his career.
At UMass he pursued research on a unified principle of reinforcement. Donahoe was also an early investigator of neural network models of behavior and was a proponent of the molecular analysis of behavior. In 1980 he published the textbook Language, Learning, and Memory coauthored by former student Michael Wessels.
With former graduate student David Palmer, Donahoe authored Learning and Complex Behavior in 1994 which “offers a parsimonious account of all human and animal behavior in terms of two analogous selection processes: natural selection and reinforcement.”