Volume 23: No. 2, February 2009

2009 Troland Research Award Recipients

by Kirk Waldroff

On January 28th, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced the names of 18 researchers in a variety of fields who will be honored this year with awards that recognize extraordinary scientific achievement.  Two of these individuals are recipients of the Troland Research Awards, which are among the most prestigious awards for early career psychological scientists.

Tirin Moore, assistant professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Andrew Oxenham, associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota, will each be presented with a Troland Research Award at an April 26 ceremony at the Academy’s 146th Annual Meeting.  Each will receive a prize of $50,000 to “recognize unusual achievement and to further their research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.”

Tirin Moore	Andrew Oxenham

Moore is being honored for “fundamental and insightful contributions to our understanding of the neuronal mechanisms that control directed visual attention.” At Stanford, Moore’s research examines “the activity of single neurons in visual and motor structures within the brain, … how perturbing that activity affects neurons in other brain structures, and … how it affects the perceptual and motor performance of behaving animals.”  Moore has also received the McKnight Scholar Award and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.

Oxenham is being honored for “profound and rigorous contributions to our understanding of the relationship between auditory perception and its underlying physiological mechanisms.” His work at the University of Minnesota “ranges from behavioral investigations of the workings of the inner ear to studies that use a combination of psychophysics and functional imaging to investigate how the brain parses multiple sound sources to form coherent auditory objects.”  He was the recipient of the R. Bruce Lindsay Award in 2001 and in 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.

The Troland Research Awards were established by a bequest from Leonard T. Troland and have been presented since 1984.  Visit the NAS website for a full listing of recipients and more information about the award.