Monday, May 18, 2026, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2
The Vision Sciences Society is delighted and honored to award the 2026 Davida Teller Award to Dr. T. Rowan Candy, a distinguished leader whose groundbreaking research has significantly advanced our understanding of how perception and action are integrated in the human brain.
Congratulations to T. Rowan Candy, the fourteenth recipient of the Davida Teller Award. The Teller Award was created to honor the late Davida Teller’s exceptional scientific achievements, commitment to equity, and strong history of mentoring. The award is given to a female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, significant, or lasting contributions to the field of vision science.
T. Rowan Candy
Indiana University
Dr. T. Rowan Candy is a Professor of Optometry and Vision Science at the Indiana University School of Optometry with adjunct roles in Psychological and Brain Sciences and IU’s Neuroscience and Cognitive Science programs. She currently serves as the Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the IU School of Optometry. She earned her Membership of the British College of Optometrists after completing her B.Sc. in Optometry at the University of Wales, Cardiff and then earned her Ph.D. in Vision Science from the University of California, Berkeley working with Marty Banks. She completed her postdoctoral work at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco with Tony Norcia. The focus of Dr. Candy’s research program is studies of both typical and atypical visual development, with a view to preventing rather than trying to treat clinical conditions resulting in permanent vision loss such as amblyopia and common types of strabismus.
Dr. Candy is an internationally recognized vision scientist whose mid-career contributions over the past two decades have been exceptional in scope and impact. Her work has reshaped how the field measures, and therefore explains, early visual development. Dr. Candy’s contributions have given the field new tools, mechanistic data, and integrative frameworks for how infants achieve robust binocular visual experience, and why, in some children, those stabilizing mechanisms derail into strabismus and amblyopia. Her recent naturalistic and computational work extends these insights into infants’ everyday visual worlds in a direction already recognized as paradigm-shifting.
Dr. Candy’s record of mentorship is as distinctive as her scientific contributions, and it is especially aligned with the Davida Teller Award’s emphasis on mentoring and equity. Dr. Candy has built a training environment that deliberately bridges basic vision science, clinical translation, and modern quantitative methods. Within her institution, Dr. Candy is a beloved teacher, and her mentees have gone on to highly visible roles spanning academia, clinical leadership, and industry research. Dr. Candy has also been a proactive leader in promoting professional development and diversity in science, coordinating initiatives at her institution and for the field at large. She has been a dedicated member and leader in the VSS community, including serving as a Board member from 2021-2024.
Dr. Candy exemplifies what the Davida Teller Award was created to recognize: transformative, lasting scientific contributions paired with sustained excellence in mentorship and equity-aligned leadership.
The Vision Sciences Society is proud to award Dr. T. Rowan Candy the 2026 Davida Teller Award, recognizing her groundbreaking contributions to vision science, her pioneering research methodologies, and her extraordinary dedication to mentorship and community leadership.