John I. Yellott Travel Award for Vision Science

The John I. Yellott Travel Award for Vision Science will be given annually to a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher who will be attending the VSS conference to present research that provides new quantitative insights into the human visual system.

The award was created in 2022 to honor Jack Yellott’s legacy of innovative, quantitative, and rigorous research that spanned many areas of vision science. His work was known for its ingenuity, creativity and clear mathematical reasoning.

Jack served as founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Sciences at University of California-Irvine. Throughout his career he served as a mentor and close collaborator to many outstanding vision scientists. He was a visible and friendly presence at ARVO and VSS. He was always interested to visit with young investigators, to listen to them and to share his thoughts, and offer support to the next generation of vision scientists. See more information about the life and work of John I. Yellott.

Application for the Yellott travel award will be made following the procedures established for other VSS Travel Grants. Those seeking a Yellott travel award will be asked to indicate, in the spirit of the work of John Yellott, how their research provides insights, preferably through quantitative modeling, about the relationship between visual stimuli, neural function, and human performance.

This award was established by friends of John (Jack) Yellott.

Schedule

Intent to Submit Application (during abstract submissions): December 3, 2026
Applications Open: January 5, 2027
Deadline to Apply: January 19, 2027
Recipients Announced: February 19, 2027

Previous Recipients

Tiziano Causin (2026)

CIMeC, University of Trento
“Prediction In Naturalistic Movies Inverts The Temporal Order Of The Visual Processing Hierarchy"

Hiroichi Yoshida (2026)

The University of Texas at Austin
“Single-trial latent neural population dynamics in frontal eye field during decisions about brief static stimuli"

Kathy Garcia (2025)

Johns Hopkins University
“Semantic and Social Features D

Marika Constant (2024)

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
“Investigating the role of long-term perceptual priors in confidence”

Spandan Madan (2024)

Harvard University
“Out-of-Distribution generalization behavior of DNN-based encoding models for the visual cortex"

Alisa Braun (2023)

UC Berkeley
“Motion blur near the resolution limit of the parafoveal retina”

Marleen Haupt (2023)

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
“The spatiotemporal neural dynamics of Braille letter representations in individuals with congenital blindness"

Dominik Straub (2022)

TU Darmstadt
“An Analysis Method for Continuous Psychophysics Based on Bayesian Inverse Optimal Control”

Ling-Qi Zhang (2022)

University of Pennsylvania
“Image Reconstruction from Cone Excitations using the Implicit Prior in a Denoiser"