Bruce Bridgeman, professor emeritus of psychology and psychobiology at UC Santa Cruz, has been named the Edward A. Dickson Professor of Psychology for the 2012-13 academic year.
Bridgeman retired last year after a 38-year career at UCSC. He joined the campus as an assistant professor in 1973. He will teach a senior seminar in psychology and evolutionary theory next fall. In the winter, he'll teach a larger course in behavioral neuroscience.
The award is named for Edward A. Dickson who served as a UC Regent from 1913 to 1946, the longest tenure of any regent. In 1955, Dickson gave an endowment to the UC to support and maintain special annual professorships to be awarded to retired academic senate faculty members. The award is funded by the UC endowment with selections made by each individual campus.
Retirement is more a theoretical concept for Bridgeman. He's teaching Psychology 123, his behavioral neuroscience course, this quarter, and is a research professor in psychology. His work centers on spatial orientation by vision and perception/action interactions.
Most recently, he has been appointed editor in chief of the journal Consciousness and Cognition. He's also the perception editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and on the editorial board of Perception and iPerception. He's scheduled to present at the Visual Sciences Society meeting in Naples, Fla. in May, participate in a symposium at the International Congress of Psychology in Cape Town, South Africa in July, and give invited talks at Mainz and Tübingen, Germany.
Bridgeman's lab currently has two graduate students and four undergraduate research assistants, working on problems of spatial orientation in vision.
