Natalia Polikarpova is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) and International Behavior Analyst (IBA) in Moscow, Russia. Her impressive career with respect to Practical Functional Assessment (PFA) and Skill-Based Treatment (SBT) began in 2017 when she first learned of the process. In 2019, she attended a two-day conference presented by Dr. Gregory Hanley in Tel Aviv, Israel, prompting her to seek additional training.
“Before receiving formal training from FTF Behavioral Consulting, I attempted numerous times to implement the Practical Functional Assessment (PFA) and Skill-Based Treatment (SBT) with clients in my care. However, the approach, while intriguing, was also very challenging. No matter the number of seminars or articles relevant to the processes I consumed, when I received supervision from Dr. Ghaemmaghami from FTF on implementing PFA-SBT, my understanding and appreciation for the value-based approach grew. I learned to implement PFA-SBT with integrity and commit to values over procedures. My experience with Dr. Ghaemmaghami is one that I am sincerely lucky and grateful to have had.
My passions shifted from implementing PFA-SBT with learners in my care to training others within the Russian community to engender a deeper understanding of Today’s ABA. Quickly, my work expanded to Latvia, Ukraine, and Georgia. My colleagues and I grew passionate about disseminating to all Russian-speaking communities and launched the PFA-SBT Russian Facebook group, “Values over Procedures,” the PFA-SBT Russian YouTube channel, and the PFA-SBT Telegram channel. Here we share updated research, translations of various articles and FTF workbooks, and access to on-demand training presented by FTF and translated into Russian.”
In addition to her private practice and dissemination efforts, Natalia is a lecturer and course director at “Azbuka ABA,” founded by Zukhra Izmailova Qamar, where she provides CEUs and IBAOs to professionals worldwide. Natalia is a board member of the Russian Professional Unit of Behavior Analysts, an association of individuals and legal entities created to support and represent common interests and develop the practical activities of specialists in Applied Behavior Analysis in Russia. Together with her colleagues Nataliia Butuzova and Maria Skorobogatova, she has translated over a dozen research articles relevant to the Practical Functional Assessment (PFA) and Skill-Based Treatment (SBT) process and assessment and treatment workbooks (i.e., PFA-SBT, Stereotypy, PLS, and Food Selectivity). In 2021, with her colleague and fellow FTF Spotlight, Nataliia Butuzova, Natalia co-authored “Functional Assessment of Problem Behavior: Interview-Informed Synthesized Contingency Analysis (IISCA),” the first systematic replication of the PFA and SBT treatment published in Russian (https://doi.org/10.17759/autdd.2021710202).
