PROFILE:
Professor Scott Churchill, PhD
Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department, and Graduate Program Director
for psychological studies, at the University of Dallas.
Professor Churchill has been teaching psychology (including classes in the ‘History of Psychology’, ‘Primate Studies’, ‘Chimpanzee Politics’, ‘People – Primates – Planet’, ‘Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots’, ‘Foundations of Psychology as a Human Science’) as well as philosophy at the University of Dallas for the past 25 years. Prior to that he taught at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, for three years.
He is currently engaged in ongoing experiential study of interspecies communication with bonobos at the Fort Worth Zoo, and is a Director of and local co-ordinator for Jane Goodall’s ‘Roots and Shoots’ series. He has said "primate research can have far-reaching ramifications for understanding not only human behaviour and language development but the evolution of human behaviour from prehistoric days to the present".
Professor Churchill has presented 70 papers at annual scientific and philosophical conferences since 1983 and has published approximately 40 articles in professional books and journals during the same period. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Humanistic Psychologist, which is a division journal for the American Psychological Association (APA); prior to that he served as editor for Methods: A Journal for Human Science. Since the early 1990s he has been active in the APA’s Division of Humanistic Psychology and its Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, serving on their executive committees and editorial boards, as well as serving as division liaison to the APA’s Science and Education Directorates. He was promoted to full professor in 2003 and named a ‘Fellow’ of the APA in 2004.
He was also a participant in the 2002 Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences programs in San Jose, California (January 2002) and at Oxford University in England (July 2002), and based on that experience wrote a proposal for a course on ‘Sciences of Humanity and Nature in Dialogue with Religion: History and Current Controversies’.
Professor Churchill has a PhD in clinical psychology, an MA in psychology and a BS in biology.