Vanderbilt psychologist Isabel Gauthier has been named a 2008 Troland Research Award winner by the National Academy of Sciences.
The annual Troland Research Awards include a prize of $50,000 each and are given to two researchers to recognize unusual achievement and to further their research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.
Gauthier was chosen “for seminal experiments on the role of visual expertise in the recognition of complex objects including faces and for exploration of brain areas activated by this recognition.”
“Isabel Gauthier is an extraordinarily talented scientist and scholar whose work is setting a new standard in a very demanding discipline. The Troland Award is a well-deserved recognition of her leadership and promise,” Interim Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos said. “We are proud to count Isabel as a colleague at Vanderbilt.”
Gauthier’s research focuses on how we perceive and recognize objects in our environment, such as faces, letters and cars, how we develop expertise in perceiving certain images and what changes occur in the brain as this expertise develops.
Gauthier is an associate professor of psychology, founder of the Perceptual Expertise Network at Vanderbilt and co-principal investigator of the Temporal Dynamics Learning Center. She is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development and the Learning Sciences Institute.
The second 2008 Troland Award went to Miguel P. Eckstein, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Troland Research Awards were established by a bequest from Leonard T. Troland and have been presented since 1984.
Media Contact: Melanie Moran, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu