Congratulations to Mike for being the 2021 winner of the Randolph Blake Early Career Award from the program in Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt. Mike is an alumnus of the CatLab. Mike came to Vanderbilt after earning a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Michigan State, where he worked with Aude Oliva before she moved to MIT. After earning his PhD from our graduate program 2011, he went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at UT Austin with Alison Preston and Brad Love (continuing after Brad left for UCL). Since 2016 Mike has been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the main campus of the University of Toronto.
The program in Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt established The Randolph Blake Early Career Award to recognize exemplary alumni of our program in the early stages of their career. The recipient receives a plaque, a $500 award, and an invitation to give a research colloquium at Vanderbilt. This award honors Randolph Blake as a distinguished Vanderbilt alumnus, as an outstanding researcher and mentor, and as a former chair of the Department of Psychology who served in that role during some of the most important years of its growth.