- 71 years old
- Born on June 20, 1943 .
- Passed away on January 21, 2015 in San Diego, California, United States.
Keith passed away peacefully, after a courageous battle with Multiple Myeloma, at the age of 71 on January 21, 2015, with his family by his side.
Keith was born June 20th in Dover, England to William Thomas and Olive Stock Rayner. His family emigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in Salt Lake City, Utah. He served an LDS mission to England from 1962-1964. Married Susan Rae Knight , December 16, 1966 in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. He attended the University of Utah and earned his Doctorate from Cornell University. Keith and his family lived in Massachusetts for 35 years before moving to San Diego. He was a professor at the University of Rochester, University of Massachusetts Amherst and the UC San Diego Atkinson Family Distinguished Professor at the time of his death. He excelled in the field of Experimental Psychology, receiving numerous honors and awards. He was an avid sports fan and particularly fond of the Boston Red Sox, Boston Celtics and the New England Patriots. He coached numerous Amherst youth baseball teams his son participated in. He was an active member of the LDS church and served in various capacities throughout his life. In addition to his loving wife, he is survived by his children, Ashley (Jason) and Jonathan (Becky), his two beautiful granddaughters, Isabel and Samantha, his mother Olive, siblings Pete (Kathy), Sue (Brent) and Julie. Preceded in death by his father (Bill), sister (Nancy), in-laws Clifford and Rae Knight), brother in-law (Dave) and nephew (Hunter).
CAREER HONORS & AWARDS:
2006 – Chancellor’s Lifetime Achievement Award, University of Massachusetts
2007 - Bartlett Lecture Lifetime Achievement Award from the Experimental
Psychology Society, UK
2009 - Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award
2010 - UC San Diego Chancellor’s Associates Research Award
2011 - Carnegie Centenary Professor by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities
of Scotland
2013 - Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy
Research Association
2014 - Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association
2014 - William James Fellow for Lifetime Achievement Award from Association for Psychological Science
2014 - Award for Excellence in Mentoring from Women in Cognitive Science
Thank you for your encouragement and sweet smile. Sometimes, when I consider my life about research, I always miss you and your research life. You are always my spiritual gurus. I hope to find a research field and explore this field further. Our works or findings can contribute to people and society. Hope everything is going well for you and your families.
Sincerely,
Best regards,
Pingping
"Thanks for giving me a chance to say a few words.
Keith joined our department at UCSD in 2008, after a very long stint at the University of Massachusetts. Keith was, to put it mildly, very well established at UMass: He knew the system well, he knew the people well, and the people knew him well. He let that go for a new adventure, to a system he didn’t know, to many people he didn’t know, and to people who knew him, but mainly by reputation. He was 65 years old at the time, an age at which many of us begin to slow down, settle in, perhaps arriving at a time when we look back and reflect on our accomplishments. Not Keith. He got here, and became more productive perhaps than at any point in his career. All of this took great courage. But courage was something Keith was not short of, a fact that all of us have been very aware of for the last few years.
Most of us know Keith for his academic accomplishments – his incredible productivity, the fact that he pretty much defined an entire field of study that will continue for decades to come, and much more. I want to talk a bit about Keith as he was as a colleague in our department, and I’d like to talk specifically about a very important role that he had with us, namely, as chair of our graduate admissions committee. Those of you who are academics know that graduate admissions is very possibly the most important committee in the department. It decides who the graduate students in the department will be, and the graduate students are the lifeblood of any department. Given his history of amazing mentorship, it was natural for Keith to join our graduate admissions committee shortly after arriving here, and as with all things he did, his natural tendency to lead led him to chair the committee. He was a great grad admissions chair, because it played to all of Keith’s strengths. It played to his strength of organization – Keith seemed to be able to get to know everyone, by name, who they are, where they came from, who else they knew. He would take notes on everyone by writing names and words on pieces of paper, no fancy computer databases. (And before anyone thinks that this must have been inefficient, remember Keith’s incredible productivity – efficiency was not a problem for him.) Chairing graduate admissions played to Keith’s effectiveness: You knew he would get the task done, just like everything else he did. It played to his good judgment, as he would know just who would be the right students to admit. Most importantly, it played to his trustworthiness, his even-handedness, his fairness. When Keith made a call, it was not because of an agenda, or because of ideology, but because it was the right, best, fairest decision. And of course, I use grad admissions to illustrate all of this, but this was how Keith did everything: His research, his interactions with his colleagues, how he led his lab, how he interacted with family and friends. It is for all of these reasons that we celebrate Keith.
I was lucky to work closely with Keith not only on department matters, but as a researcher. We co-advised Liz Schotter, only one of the literally dozens of brilliant graduate students and post docs that Keith mentored to successful careers and successful lives. Of all of Keith’s accomplishments – and there are many – I’m going to guess that his mentorship of these incredible minds was his proudest. And that only seems right, and it seems comforting, as we know that through these great people, Keith’s work, his ethic, and his influence will live on for many years to come.
To Sue, Ashley, Jonathan, and the rest of Keith’s family: Thank you for sharing Keith with us all these many years. He made our department a better place than it would have been without him. And for that, we are grateful, and we celebrate.
Thanks."
Keith, thank you for your kind and compassionate mentorship. I knew I could always come to you for advice.
I am from a poor, uneducated background, While at UMASS as an undergrad he convinced me to take graduate courses. His, "You can do this, you are as smart as anyone here" comment has stayed with me for life.
I now teach at an urban community college passing along that message to many others that need to hear it. He was truly a blessing, directly and indirectly, to so many.
To his family: I know he worked long hours. Thank you for sharing him with us.
I am forever grateful of the welcoming and genuine atmosphere he created in the lab, making it a joy for me to come in every day.
His presence is among everyone he mentored or encountered.
I am truly blessed to have been able to meet him.
Keith was always there to provide support when I needed it and to prod me when I needed it. He will be very sorely missed!
I want to sent my thoughts and prayers to Keith's family, and all those who loved him!
I miss you. I miss chatting in your office, while you are sitting back in your chair, sometimes with your feet up on your desk. You had a way to sit back, listen, say few words, but yet your presence was phenomenal and your influence profound…on me, on many. When I met you, it took me a while to notice the playful sparkle in your eye, not because it wasn’t there, but because, like many, I was somewhat overwhelmed to be sitting in front of the best in the world. Yet, the sparkle was there and I soon realized that besides the science talk, you were always ready for a laugh, extremely willing to be poked fun at. In you, I met the most kind, considerate, and generous mentor I could hope for when I moved to California and your constant, effortless aim for the best inspired me and has had a profound influence on my career. Thank you. I want to honor you by passing your commitment to your students and collaborators on to my future students. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to do so as well as you did, because you were exceptional, but you’ll be in the back of my mind for the rest of my life and I am sure I’ll regularly hear your deep voice saying “Nathalie, my office”! You were an incredible model, but I gotta tell you there is one thing I will never do to my students: sneak up behind them, ninja-style, to look at their computer screen and then ask (and terrify the person you just snuck up on): “what are you working on”? ☺ Much love to Sue, Jonathan, Ashley, your Mom and your family. Rest in peace, Keith. I miss you.
Nathalie
It has been so fun to read all of the tributes people have left on this site. He was always just Keith around us.
He loved to play games (as long as he won) with us and with our children and grandchildren. Rarely one of us could beat him at some game and boy, were we proud of ourselves! We love Keith and will all miss him very, very much. We can find comfort in the fact that he had such a huge impact on so many lives.
Thanks so much for starting this memorial page for him. I am looking forward to meeting some of you when we come down for the Memorial Service in San Diego on February 14th.
Since his passing, I have been missing him and wishing that I had a chance to say goodbye. I wrote a short poem in which I imagine walking with him one last time. I would like to share it with others who might have similar feelings:
you never know what`s around the corner
whispered the man as he crossed the border
they marched in silence as they parted way
thinking of the bonds that will never fray
a door had opened and another closed
standing in the light he was all exposed
he considered himself the luckiest man
finding uncommon grace in the lion's den
And not just a great researcher, but also a great personality, also towards junior people in the field. He will be missed.
My condoleances to family and friends...
Keith has been a close friend of Chinese people. He was invited to visit Tianjin, China in 2004 and during that first visit Keith gave us a series of excellent courses regarding the basic paradigms, methods and principles in eye movement research. He provided a great help in advancing our knowledge of eye movements.
The biannual Chinese International Conference on Eye Movements (CICEM) was co-initiated by Professor Keith Rayner and Professor Deli Shen during his first visit to Tianjin, and these have now been held successfully six times. This conference has now become an important platform for academic communication of eye movement research between Chinese researchers and other International researchers.
Keith has been a great mentor to us! We are very sad for his leaving. We will remember him forever!
Keith is a bright star in his field. As everyone says, he created the field he starred in. Research on eye movements and reading will always bear the Rayner mark. He was a star in psychology more broadly. Through his editorships of JEP:LMC and Psych Review, he did a lot to make psychology much better — all of it, not just cognitive psychology. Tom Carr says the editorial process is a part of research, and Keith guided a lot of research in his thoughtful action letters. I got a few from him as an author and I saw many more as a reviewer, having served on his boards for both journals. He knew how to help the authors see what was important and how and why they could improve their work. His action letters were direct and clear — deal with this point, don’t worry so much about that one — and they moved a lot of researchers forward in their careers. The editorial process is our post-graduate continuing education, and Keith was the master teacher.
I will miss him. I still need his answer to my email…
In some ways it is very hard for me to understand, fully, how I got from there to here, because much of it was through Keith's brand of magic. Since 2008, I have been Keith's successor as the director of the eyetracking lab at UMass. Keith supported me without always letting me even know what he was up to, expected me to have answers, gave me enough rope to hang myself but made sure I didn't....he was like no one else I've known, and no one else I will know, in the way he could get everyone around him to produce their best work, and really, to be their best selves. He intimidated some people who didn't really know him, and he liked it that way, I think. But actually, he would do anything for you. I like to think that he and I had a kind of funny bond. I've been looking back through old emails with Keith (this is when laziness in deleting emails becomes a virtue), and I see how I became his kind of thinker, even though he always did make a bit of fun of my interests in theoretical linguistics. Anyone who has heard Keith say the words 'filler gap' will know what I mean.
So he's gone, and I will miss him. Yes, professionally, but mostly personally. I owe him an awful lot, and I was awfully fond of him.
He cared about each and every one of his students, both undergraduate and graduate. He saw potential in the students he mentored and collaborated with, and pushed us (sometimes unbeknownst to us) to realize our full potential. For me, and for many of my former undergraduate peers, he played an immense role in our academic, and research career development.
I am eternally grateful to have known such an amazing scientist, mentor, and person as Keith Rayner. He will be dearly missed by all of us.
-Tara (Chaloukian) Tenenbaum
Keith was gentle, unassuming, provocative, quietly brilliant: the very qualities that initially terrified me as a budding scientist. Over time though, I learned that "Matt, come into my office" was often a light request, sometimes meaning "I've locked myself out of my iPad and I'm too embarrassed to tell anyone else"; I learned just how deeply he cared for every one of his students and colleagues; I learned that dozens of us were willing to devote our professional lives to studying the work of the eyes during reading because of the spectacle that he made it.
It's a great privilege to have worked with such an astounding scientist, and I'm very sad to see him go. However, it has also become clear to me just how brilliant and supportive the community (family, perhaps) that he built around himself really is, and I am proud to be a part of it. Rest in peace.
-Matt Abbott
One of my fondest memories of Keith is dragging him on a shopping trip after a study section meeting in DC. I still remember him with me in a BCBG store diplomatically suggesting I choose a green sweater instead of my usual black. As always, Keith was right.
I'm really going to miss him.
When I heard the bad news from my advisor Xingshan Li,I was shocked and felt so much sorrow. I have benefited a lot from your wisdom in both scientific research and daily life.
As a grandson of you in the neurotree, I admired your great contributions to psychological science, selfless cultivation of future researchers, and your braveness in fighting with illness. All these will be inherited from generation to generation.
We will remember you forever.
From Guojie Ma
Institute of Psychology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences