While any premature death confronts the left-behind with the maddening frailty of life, my first response to the news of Dave’s passing was to shout why, of all people, he had to be the outlier. Dave was one the most wonderful people I have known. He was my advisor on a side project I did as a postdoc at the University of Rochester in 2007-8, on causal inference when combining peripheral visual information with memory for reaching movements. Dave generously made his time, insights, and lab resources available to this theoretical neuroscientist who wanted to get trained as a psychophysicist. In our discussions, he was always two steps ahead, but also always made sure I caught up. Dave was the kindest, gentlest mentor one could ever wish for, and had the extraordinary ability to take the pressure off of doing research. Research is stressful for many reasons, but it really helps if your advisor is not judgmental, makes you feel like an equal collaborator rather than like a minion, and prefers solid work that stands the test of time over fancy but fragile publications. Dave also had immense patience with struggling students, and treated students and postdocs with the same level of respect and engagement as professors.
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.