My Career: Science, Research, Policy, and Ethics
I spent most of his childhood in Newark and graduated in 1967 from Union High School in Union, New Jersey, where my interest in science was nurtured by the inspirational advanced biology teacher Irwin Jaeger. My undergraduate years were spent at Brandeis University, where I started in biophysics, but rapidly came under the sway of the cognitive revolution. Because of the proximity to Cambridge, Mass. with institutions like MIT and Harvard, and the influence of people like Noam Chomsky, it was a very heady intellectual environment. A new program in psychology and language was started at Brandeis, with John Frederiksen, and Samuel Jay Keyser (then at Brandeis, later at MIT) serving as faculty coordinators. I think that I was the second student in the program. Other who were either a part of the program during its brief tenure or took related courses included Robert Remez, Louis Goldstein, Lynne E. Bernstein, Betty Tuller, and Ed Witten. Related faculty included Arthur Wingfield, Maurice Hershenson, Jim Lackner, Ray Jackendoff, and others. We also benefited from ad hoc presentations or classes, both at Brandeis and in Cambridge, given by people like Chomsky and Jerry Fodor.
Political and social turmoil in the nation led to local events that impacted academics at Brandeis. I moved off campus to Porter Square in Cambridge. In addition to physics and biology, I was interested in computational modeling, mathematics, and statistical analysis. I requested, and received permission, to use the computing facilities at Harvard (in the punched card era), and continued to do most of my work there while still enrolled at Brandeis. I returned to campus at the start of my senior year, where I met my (then) future wife, Joette Katz, a freshman. We were married later that year. Finishing up my undergraduate career, I wrote an honors thesis on the relationship of Markovian models and finite state grammars. I received my BA in psychology and linguistics from Brandeis in 1971.
During the summer between my junior and senior years at Brandeis, I was able to get a position at what was then called the Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine (IRM) , in New York City (it is now called Rusk Rehabilitation, a part of NYU Langone Health ), working on analyzing data related to stroke patients. While there I met a consultant named Lou Gerstman, co-inventor, along with John Kelly, of the computer portrayed as HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I mentioned to Lou that I had been reading a paper on aphasia by Donald Shankweiler and Katherine Safford Harris. Lou mentioned that he was also a part-time researcher at Haskins Laboratories (first in NYC and then New Haven), and that Shankweiler and Harris were both affiliated with Haskins, along with Philip Lieberman, Arthur Abramson, and others. Lou said that I should apply to graduate school at a university connected to Haskins, such as the University of Connecticut, Yale, or his program at CUNY. I did, but decided to go to UConn because Joette still had a few more years left at Brandeis and Storrs would end up being closer to Waltham than NYC.
The intellectual environment at UConn was outstanding, with a remarkable cohort of student and amazing faculty in both the psychology and linguistics departments. Some of my classmates included Steve Braddon, Carol Fowler, Diane Kewley-Port, Peter Kugler, Gary Kuhn, Claire Michaels, Terry Nearey, Robert Port, Tim Rand, Robert Remez, Jim Todd, Bill Warren, and many others. I received my PhD in experimental psychology in 1975 under the tutelage of Michael Turvey, Ignatius Mattingly, Philip Lieberman, and Alvin Liberman. After graduating I was an in assistant professor in psychology at UConn in the 1975-1976 year, and also commuting down to New Haven to do research and computer work at Haskins. My teaching load during this time included 10 course — 5 each semester, which these days would usually be considered onerous. It was not for me, and I decided to pursue a research career.
See, also:
My Career: Science, Research, Policy, and Ethics
Ethical Issues Related to Research and Technology
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
BioSketchList of Science and Policy RolesDownload CV as a PDF fileWikipedia pageHome | AI-list | Career | Links | Pubs | Wall Art | Demos | Contact