Northampton, MA – John William Donahoe died on the morning of January 8th due to complications from pneumonia at the age of 93. He was born on May 21, 1932, in Nutley, New Jersey, the first child of five to parents Leonard Mathew Donahoe and Ann Verner Query. He was pre-deceased by his loving wife, Mildred (Millie) Jane Donahoe, and leaves behind his three children Kirk Howard, Lisa Ann, and Grant Matthew. In addition to his grieving children, John leaves behind Kirk’s wife Helen (Cox) with their son John and daughter Kelly and her husband Alex Pineyro, and Grant’s wife Linda (Dubois) with their daughters Taylor and Kendall. At the time of his death, he maintained his residence in Amherst where the family resided for 55 years and maintained frequent contact with his surviving siblings, Joe and James Donahoe.
In John’s early years the family moved to various locations in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but they settled in Montclair, New Jersey for his high school years. This is where, at a social function, he met Millie, the love of his life. He reflected that he saw her across the room, backlit by the sun shining through a window behind her and remarked “What a beautiful woman”. They dated through high school and separated for a short time while both Millie and John went on to higher learning institutions. They reunited and married in 1953, prior to John attending graduate school. Their journey took them from New Jersey to Lexington, Kentucky and lastly to Amherst, Massachusetts, where they resided until the end of their lives. These ‘best friends’ 72 years of marriage were full of love and joy raising their three children. Every summer they took a family vacation to numerous historical monuments and battlefields (because John loved history) and to Maine, Cape Cod, and New Hampshire. They had their weekly rituals – Thursday nights at Judie’s restaurant, and grocery shopping (pizza night), and earlier in their marriage bridge playing with friends, cocktail parties, etc. Once the children were raised, they took numerous trips to the western National Parks and Europe. Additionally, they were very loving and supportive of their four grandchildren.
John also had an incredibly sharp mind with almost complete recall of anything he read from information in his field to pop culture or historical facts. His colleagues at times referred to him as a “biological search engine”. Because of this, he was never invited to play Trivial Pursuit with the family.
John began his academic career with undergraduate work at Rutgers University, followed by graduate work at the University of Kentucky, where he received his doctorate in experimental psychology and neurophysiology in 1958. His scholarship was so conspicuous that he was invited to join the faculty when a position opened before he had even received his degree. Two highlights of his early career include training chimpanzees in operant tasks for NASA and spending a sabbatical year at the Center for Brain Research at the University of Rochester. In 1969 he accepted a position in the psychology department at the University of Massachusetts where he remained for the rest of his career.
John’s laboratory work was in the experimental analysis of behavior in both classical and operant conditioning. His major achievement was his formulating a unified principle of reinforcement which accommodated the findings of both paradigms. He was an early proponent and designer of neural network models of behavior, a close cousin to the reinforcement learning models that underlie the current explosion of artificial intelligence. In his extrapolation to the world outside the laboratory, he allied himself closely with the position of B. F. Skinner. He was the primary author of three books, one on learning principles, one on the interpretation of complex behavior, and one on neural network models of cognition. The second has remained in print for 32 years and is widely regarded as holding a unique position in the field.
John was an exceptional person, husband, father, and neuroscientist and he will be greatly missed.
John’s immediate family and relatives will lay him to rest at a private ceremony. A tribute to his life is planned for the future. Additionally, his contribution to the field of neuroscience will be recognized in various forums in 2026.
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