Julie Skinner Vargas (born 1938) is an American educator who has written extensively on the science of behavior. Vargas is the daughter of B.F. Skinner and is the president of the B. F. Skinner Foundation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is an officer of The International Society for Behaviorology.

Biography

Vargas received a bachelor's degree in music from Radcliffe College, a master's degree in music education from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in educational research from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a faculty member at West Virginia University, where she and her husband, Ernest A. Vargas, taught for more than 30 years in the College of Human Resources and Education.

Behaviorology: Skinner's new science

Vargas has written that "What B. F. Skinner began is not an 'approach', 'view', 'discipline', 'field', or 'theory'. It was, and is, a science, differing from psychology in its dependent variables, its measurement system, its procedures, and its analytic framework". She and a number of her colleagues have given Skinner's science the name "behaviorology", which may be defined as the natural science of the behavior of organisms.