About Us
Charles Merbitz, Ph.D., BCBA-D, the primary researcher behind the D-AIM App, has been working in Applied Behavior Analysis for over 35 years.
Bio:
After experience as a Certified School Psychologist in Florida, he started a Personalized System of Instruction Center at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.
In 1980 he moved to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), where he became Director of RIC’s Learning Research Unit and joined the faculty of the Northwestern University Medical School. At RIC, Chuck’s research focused upon the development of a computerized data collection and analysis system that was applied across a wide variety of behavioral issues in medical rehabilitation, including pressure sore prevention after spinal cord injury, logical problem solving after brain injury, and communication disorders and gait improvement measures after stroke.
The contrast between the direct frequency measures of patient and clinician behavior used in his ABA research and the ordinal-based assessment practices used for reimbursement lead him and his team to write an article which 20 years after publication was the 23rd most cited paper in the medical rehabilitation literature.
In 1992 Chuck accepted a faculty position at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also served as the University’s disability accommodations officer.
In 2004 Chuck resigned his tenured position at IIT to become Professor of Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, where he started the ABA Master’s and Doctoral programs and became the first Chair of the new ABA Department. Curricula and procedures from this Department became the models for ABA Departments in Los Angeles and Washington DC, and the basis for an online ABA program.
In 2012 Chuck retired from academia to follow his wife to her position at the University of Michigan Hospital. Chuck served multiple terms as a Director for the American Association of Spinal Cord Injury Psychologists and Social Workers, the Standard Celeration Society and the Cambridge Center.