The John I. Yellott Travel Award for Vision Science will be given annually to a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher who will be attending the VSS conference to present research that provides new quantitative insights into the human visual system.

The award was created in 2022 to honor Jack Yellott’s legacy of innovative, quantitative, and rigorous research that spanned many areas of vision science. His work was known for its ingenuity, creativity and clear mathematical reasoning.

Jack served as founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Sciences at University of California-Irvine. Throughout his career he served as a mentor and close collaborator to many outstanding vision scientists. He was a visible and friendly presence at ARVO and VSS. He was always interested to visit with young investigators, to listen to them and to share his thoughts, and offer support to the next generation of vision scientists. See more information about the life and work of John I. Yellott.

Application for the Yellott travel award will be made following the procedures established for other VSS Travel Grants. Those seeking a Yellott travel award will be asked to indicate, in the spirit of the work of John Yellott, how their research provides insights, preferably through quantitative modeling, about the relationship between visual stimuli, neural function, and human performance.

This award was established by friends of John (Jack) Yellott.

Schedule

Intent to Submit Application (during abstract submissions): December 5, 2024
Applications Open: January 6, 2025
Deadline to Apply: January 24, 2025
Recipients Announced: February 14, 2025

2024 Recipients

Marika Constant

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
“Investigating the role of long-term perceptual priors in confidence”

Spandan Madan

Harvard University
“Out-of-Distribution generalization behavior of DNN-based encoding models for the visual cortex”

2023 Recipients

Alisa Braun

UC Berkeley
“Motion blur near the resolution limit of the parafoveal retina”

Marleen Haupt

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
“The spatiotemporal neural dynamics of Braille letter representations in individuals with congenital blindness”