Randolph Blake is the first recipient of a new award established to recognize our most outstanding alumni, The Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt Distinguished Alumnus Lecture. Randolph was selected from the submitted nominations by a committee of faculty from the Department of Psychology and the Department of Psychology and Human Development.

Not everyone may know that Randolph earned his PhD from Vanderbilt in 1972. After many years as a faculty member at Northwestern University, he returned to the Department of Psychology in 1988 to become chair. Randolph has had an exceptionally distinguished career, making many significant contributions to the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. He has published more than 200 papers in scientific journals, including eight in Science, six in Nature, seven in Nature Neuroscience, ten in Psychological Science, and three in Psychological Review. This is an exceptional level of productivity in the highest impact journals in the field. Randolph’s h index (where h is the number of papers that have been cited at least h times) is 35. For some context, in the paper by J.E. Hirsch that first proposed the h index, it was noted that the median h index for Nobel Prize winners in physics was around 35-39. Randolph has received national and international recognition for his accomplishments. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He won the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, the Earl Sutherland Prize Distinguished Faculty Award, and Chancellor’s Research Award from Vanderbilt University.

Randolph’s exceptional record of accomplishments, impact, and recognition places him in the very top ranks of distinguished Vanderbilt alumni. We’re fortunate to have him as both a colleague and a friend.

Randolph will be giving a lecture sometime in the spring.