Last month the private, nonprofit National Academy of Sciences announced that a UC Santa Barbara psychologist would be honored in April along with 12 other individuals for extraordinary scientific achievements that benefit the public.

Miguel P. Eckstein, associate professor of psychology, will receive one of the academy’s Troland Research Awards. These research awards of $50,000 are given annually to only two recipients under the age of 40 as recognition of unusual achievement and to further their research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.

Eckstein who is affiliated with UCSB’s Vision and Image Understanding Laboratory, will be honored “for sophisticated theoretical analysis and modeling that address fundamental issues in perception and cognition and their application to the practical problems of medical imaging,” said the academy.

His research focuses on several questions revolving around how the brain processes visual information, based on actual human performance. “I also study the visual, cognitive, and decision processes by which doctors detect and classify abnormalities in medical images,” he added.

Isabel Gauthier, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., is the other Troland award recipient. She was chosen “for seminal experiments on the role of visual expertise in the recognition of complex objects, including faces.”  

The awards, which will be presented on April 27 at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., cover several areas: biology, chemistry, solar physics, ecology, mathematics, oceanography, paleontology, and the social sciences, as well as psychology. Information about the award winners can be found on the Web at <http://national-academies.org>.

The Troland Research Awards were established by a bequest from Leonard T. Troland and have been presented since 1984.