Roberta Klatzky Honored by Association for Psychological Science

By Stefanie Johndrow

A world-renowned expert in cognition, Carnegie Mellon University’s Roberta L. Klatzky has been awarded the 2019 Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award.

The award honors psychological scientists for their lifetime of significant achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on critical problems and challenges in society at large. Klatzky will receive the award during the 2019 APS Annual Convention at the end of May, where she’ll give the talk, “Sensory Technology as Target and Tool for Applied Psychological Science.”

“Bobby’s research on the deep connection between human perception and human action has had uniquely real-world impacts in domains as varied as tele-operation and helping the blind to navigate. She is richly deserving of this honor,” said Michael J. Tarr, head of the Department of Psychology and the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Cognitive and Brain Science.

Klatzky joined CMU’s faculty in 1993 and is the Charles J. Queenan Jr. University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Psychology, with appointments in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute.

Klatzky investigates perception, action and touch from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Her research has been instrumental to the development of telemanipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind and neural rehabilitation.

“This award is particularly important to me because it honors the connection between basic and applied science that has been a longstanding goal of my research,” said Klatzky, who served as APS Treasurer for 20 years.

Klatzky has authored more than 300 articles and chapters and has written or edited seven books. Her many other awards include the 2010 Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, providing her with support for a period of collaborative research in Munich, and the Kurt Koffka Medaille from Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany for her work on perception and action. In 2018, Klatzky was elevated to a fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization.