One fun memory: Dave reading the boys excerpts from a Dave Barry book. He'd start in a regular way, then begin laughing, try again to read, then laugh harder and tear up, then try again until we were all hysterical.
Please share your memories of a remarkable scientist, teacher, and friend.
Tributes
Leave a tributeOne fun memory: Dave reading the boys excerpts from a Dave Barry book. He'd start in a regular way, then begin laughing, try again to read, then laugh harder and tear up, then try again until we were all hysterical.
I feel a tremendous sense of loss that that Ari and Josh don’t have him beside them as young adults, but I imagine them remembering things he had shared with them when they were younger and hope that they feel him with them now.
So many miss Dave in their lives.
Deb, Ari, and Josh, I think of you often. It's so cruel that Dave was taken from you so early. He always spoke of you with such joy and pride, and I hope you always carry that with you.
Regretfully, only a few of us have been lucky to interact with Dave. I will remember his generosity in spending time with us in Dan Kersten’s lab, his unpresuming thirst to get to the bottom of a problem, and of course his contagious laughter.
I received the sad news through a text message when I was at an NIH study section. One of Dave's proposals was discussed at the same study section a year or two ago when I started serving on that panel. I remembered the discussion. The shocking news put everything in perspective. I miss Dave as a colleague and friend!
He cared about his students' future. I will never forget the many times that he went out of the way to help me both inside and outside the classroom. Dave played a major role in my undergrad and made my college life a great learning experience. As a mentor, he was always so impossibly patient and calm with me whether it came to teaching, advising or consoling. He always stood by me and gave his support unconditionally. His intelligent foresight and logical manner of thinking was not restricted to cognitive science research but extended to advising on real life situations.
Dave, your kindness will never be forgotten. I miss you and will always remember you.
Forever grateful, Amulya
Memorable forever: one late night we "borrowed" some really old wheelchairs (probably left out for trash) from the hospital. well, we rolled around and quoted the poems we knew - our favorites - and 2 were E.A.Poe. God bless the Knill family, David's wonderfulness will shine on, and we are all blessed by his life.
Dave was also a very close personal friend. He and I talked a lot over the years about raising families and adventures we might organize that would create ever stronger bonds within them. Scuba diving was one of these, and I was thrilled that Dave had encouraged his family to learn to dive, as I had sometime earlier with my family. My son Kris and I managed to dive with Dave only once, and never with our entire respective families. That single dive was an unforgettable experience, a story best told over a beer. I will always deeply regret that we did not find the time for more adventures of this kind together. Dave was so warm, so smart, so thoughtful, and so full of life, it remains difficult to comprehend that he is no longer with us. I will miss him on so many levels, always.
One of my favorite memories I have of Dave was very early in grad school, when I stopped him after class to show him a figure that demonstrated a correlation I had found in my data. I was super excited to have found something I thought was worth talking about, and just expected him to take a few minutes to say that my finding looks good. Instead, after I explained what I was showing and how I got to it, he gently told me it was the wrong way to interpret my results. However, I was feeling a bit precious about the figure (I mean, I had found an Interesting Result!) and wasn't willing to let go of it. He picked up on my reservations, so his response was to ball up the figure and throw it into the wastebasket across the room.
What happened next was amazing. Rather than assert his authority and let me figure out for myself where I went wrong, he engaged me in a conversation about how I got to the result now residing in the wastebasket. I explained from the start what I was attempting to do, and he guided the conversation until we together found the point where I'd made my mistake. From there, he patiently laid out the relevant theory and made sure I was getting it, never getting too ahead or impatient with the rate I was absorbing the information. By the end of the conversation he had clearly laid out the right way to get to the goal I was pursuing and made sure I understood how to go about it. In total, he spent about an hour and a half on a conversation he wasn't planning on, but never made any indication that I was inconveniencing him or that he didn't have the time. All he cared about was helping me learn.
I've thought about that meeting a lot since then, and the lessons wrapped up in it. The first was a fundamental shift in the way I viewed my work. Research isn't about a blind scramble to find patterns, but rather an organized attempt to understand the how and why underneath what we observe. Despite being one of the fathers of applying Bayesian Inference to perception, he was always very clear in his belief that it was only a tool to help us understand the brain, and was not one to get carried away with putting theories ahead of reality. He was equally comfortable talking about theory and experimentation, which gave him deep insight into the meaning of both. The second thing I learned was from the way he treated me throughout the conversation. It could have been a defeat, and yet he turned it into progress. In that moment and in several conversations since he has demonstrated that keeping the well-being of others as a top priority is not incompatible with being a top tier scientist. It was amazing to hear the scope of his sincere caring for everyone he met, and encouraging to know that there is opportunity for a family man to pursue an academic career.
Dave will forever be a role model to me. Moving forward, I am going to do my best to use his lessons to walk a path similar to his, both professionally and personally. I believe the best way to honor him is to remember how he lived, and use the memory of his care for others as a template for how we should live.
After I had started a faculty job in Houston and could not finish my project, Dave was very understanding in spite of all the time he had invested in it. We kept in touch since. I found myself following Dave’s lead in many aspects of my academic life: exploiting the power of psychophysics for comparing process models of brain function, not shying away from the effort needed to “clean up” existing literature, and attempting to improve education (Dave once taught a statistics class for psychology majors entirely from Bayesian principles…). Dave was my favorite workshop invitee (on high-level vision in 2010, and on visual working memory in 2012), and my favorite suggested reviewer because of his breadth of knowledge and his fairness.
In scientific conversations, Dave’s comments were typically unassuming and unintrusive, but crystal-clear and the most valuable of all. He grasped new ideas very quickly. Back in Rochester for a talk in 2011, I told him about a new data set that we had collected, and with a single question (did you try an ISI of zero?), he revealed its flaws. During my talk, he correctly guessed the details of the categorization task we had used, because he had used a similar task 16 years earlier; amazingly, there was no trace of annoyance at my ignorance.
Unlike many scientists, Dave cared about the real world. Over dinner during the working memory workshop in Portland in 2012, we got to talk about the real-world applicability of our type of research, and Dave argued that a model-based understanding of working memory might lead to better diagnostic tests of concussion/traumatic brain injury. It was not only clear that he had far more than superficial knowledge of the practical need for such improved diagnosis in competitive sports (much more than say the average NIH grant applicant has about the disease they claim their research will help cure), but also that he cared deeply about the athletes’ fates.
I spoke with Dave most recently at the Vision Sciences Society meeting in May 2014, where he spontaneously sat down for an hour with my student Edgar Walker and me to give feedback on the talk on the aperture problem that Edgar was going to give the next day. He had no stake in the project at all.
One more memory I have of Dave is not science-related. One day when I was sitting on the sidelines in the U of R gym waiting for a badminton court to open up, I happened to see Dave play basketball with his sons on the neighboring, otherwise empty court. It was a beautiful image of family bonds.
Dave, I will miss you a lot.
Dave also taught me the importance of work-life balance, which initially clashed with my workaholic tendencies. On my first day at work, not even an hour into my first project, he came by to tell me to take it easy and spend time settling into the department and Rochester; having a life outside of work was just as important. He also worried for me when I started my masters program part-time with an ambitious courseload and wanted to check that I still had time for myself even after work hours and class hours. Not to mention, it was always easy to strike up a conversation with him about non-work related topics, even during work meetings.
Although I only knew Dave mainly within the confines of Meliora Hall, I could tell he followed his own advice, from the many times he'd be out spending time with his family, or instances like the department canoe trip where he'd eagerly play ultimate frisbee alongside undergrad and grad students. (One time, he had forgotten his frisbee and drove half an hour just to get it and come back.) Dave had an infectious joy of life that I'll sorely miss, but I hope I and others who knew him can keep that life-loving spirit going strong.
Dave had an incredible passion for discovery - he insisted that the point of research wasn’t just to publish papers, it was to learn something new. He would get so excited about every new idea that we would discuss, and he would be impatient to find out what the next analysis might show. He also brought a love of rigor to his science, “good enough” wasn’t ever good enough for him - he wanted to run one more experiment, one more analysis and one more test to really make sure that we understood the underlying process. Dave was also a wonderful example of how one might balance work and fun. While he derived great joy from research, he truly enjoyed so many more things - his family, running, skiing, scuba diving, Belgian beer, New Orleans, and the list goes on.
I will miss Dave very much. I will miss his steadfast encouragement, wise counsel and his impeccable moral compass. I will miss being able to get his advice on whatever project I am working on, I will miss writing papers with him and most of all, I will miss talking to him.
Leave a Tribute
One fun memory: Dave reading the boys excerpts from a Dave Barry book. He'd start in a regular way, then begin laughing, try again to read, then laugh harder and tear up, then try again until we were all hysterical.
Over the last few days I have been thinking a lot about the time that I was Dave's post-doc. I changed to a somewhat different research field since then, but I always imagined meeting him again at a conference where we would chat about what we had been doing since. I am very sad that that will not going to happen.
I remember arriving in Rochester for my new job, together with my (since a few weeks) ‘dependent alien’ husband Andries, while our luggage got lost somewhere on the way and being somewhat shocked about the basement where everybody was working without any windows!?! Dave seemed to be happy enough though. Who needs windows when you can talk and think about cue combination and modelling, when you can write, program and simply get to the bottom of anything that needs to be figured out! I was very happy to work with someone that smart, that dedicated to science and so completely uninterested in trivial things like status and citations. He also wanted us students and post-docs to feel at home, and organized Friday afternoon drinks where we discussed religion and politics. For Andries and me, the opportunity to work in Dave’s lab also gave us the interesting experience to live in the US for a while and to explore the beautiful surroundings. I have very fond memories of a weekend in January 2007 when Dave invited CVS at a house somewhere in the snow. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but I do remember Dave’s warm hospitality (we were allowed to smuggle in a friend from the astrophysics department), playing games in the evening, cross-country skiing and trying out snow shoes for the first time in my life. We had a lot of fun, and I am sure Dave too, even though he could not stop himself from spending some time to work during this weekend as well!