February 2005: Volume 19. No. 2

DeAngelis and Feldman Win 2005 Troland Research Awards
by Amena Hassan, Science Communications Officer

Gregory C. DeAngelis of Washington University and Jacob Feldman of Rutgers University were named as the recipients of the 2005 Troland Research Awards in Psychology. The awards, each in the amount of $50,000, are granted every year to two young investigators, age 40 or younger, by the National Academies of Sciences and recognize notable achievement as well as further empirical research dealing with relationships between consciousness and the physical world.

Gregory DeAngelis received his award for his fundamental contributions to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying stereoscopic vision: the discovery of a disparity mechanism and how it contributes to depth perception.

"When I found out about the award, I was just astounded, blown away," stated Angelis. "It is such an honor to be part of the list of recipients of this award. So many of the people on that list have been an inspiration to me in my career, and it is somewhat hard to believe that I can be sharing this distinction with them. I can only hope that my career will follow the trajectory that many of the past recipients have established."

Jacob Feldman received his award for his advancement of mathematical and computational approaches to perceptual organization in human vision and human concept learning.

"I am thrilled to receive this award from NAS," said Feldman. "Much of my work involves problems people have been interested in for hundreds of years, such as how the visual system organizes the image into coherent 'objects', and how the brain organizes the world into coherent 'concepts', but that we have only been able to make technical progress on relatively recently. This kind of recognition helps make it possible to pursue this work with as few impediments as possible, and I'm grateful to the NAS for making it possible."

Funds are used by the recipient to support his or her research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology, including the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. For both awards, preference is given to experimental work, which takes a quantitative or other formal approach, including mathematics and explicit algorithms (e.g., computer modeling) or symbolic logics of various types, and/or to experimental research seeking physiological explanations. For 2005 award nomination information, please visit the NAS website at: http://www4.nationalacademies.org/nas/nasaward.nsf/NominationPub/Awards_Nominations.