OBITUARY:

Julie Epelboim 1964-2001

Julie Epelboim died of cancer on January 10, 2001, about six months after it had been diagnosed. Her death deprived the visual science community of one of its most promising and productive young scientists. Dr. Epelboim made important contributions to the study of the role of cognitive processes in human oculomotor control and to the use of eye movements to infer cognitive processing.

Dr. Epelboim was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States with her family in 1977, attended Carnegie Mellon University, and received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics with Majors in Computer Science & Psychology in 1988. From 1990-1995, she attended the University of Maryland at College Park, receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology for her dissertation, "Cognitive and Motor Coordination in Visuomotor Tasks", under the direction of Prof. Robert M. Steinman. Between 1995 and 1998 she was a NIH-NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, where she studied "Mathematical Modeling of Cognitive Processes" under the direction of Prof. Patrick Suppes. Shortly after completing her postdoctoral work at Stanford she won a NRC Research Associateship at the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute for Standards &Technology. She died during her first year in residence at NIST.

Dr. Epelboim's more important publications are listed below, where it is evident that scientists from a variety of backgrounds had an opportunity to collaborate with her during her brief career. We, her main collaborators, decided to publish this obituary because we wanted our colleagues, who did not have the good fortune of working with her, to know that science suffered a great loss with her untimely death.



James R. Booth

Mark Edwards

Han Collewijn

Casper J. Erkelens

Andrew N. Herst

Zygmunt Pizlo

Eileen Kowler

Azriel Rosenfeld

Patrick Suppes

Robert M. Steinman





PUBLICATIONS

Epelboim, J. (1998) Gaze and retinal-image-stability in two kinds of sequential looking tasks. Vision Research, 38, 3773-3784.

Epelboim, J. & Kowler, E. (1993) Slow control with eccentric targets: Evidence against a position-corrective model. Vision Research, 33, 361-380.

Epelboim, J., & Steinman, R. M. (1994). Reading unspaced text: Implications for theories of reading eye movements. Vision Research, 34, 1735-1766.

Epelboim, J., Steinman, R. M., Kowler, E., Edwards, M., Pizlo, Z., Erkelens, C. J. & Collewijn, H. (1995). The function of visual search and memory in sequential looking tasks. Vision Research, 35, 3401-3422.

Epelboim, J., Kowler, E., Steinman, R. M., Collewijn, H., Erkelens, C. J. & Pizlo, Z. (1995). When push comes to shove: compensation for passive perturbations of the head during natural gaze shifts. Journal of Vestibular Research, 5, 421-442.

Epelboim, J., Booth, J. R. & Steinman, R. M. (1996). Much ado about nothing: The place of space in text. Vision Research, 36, 465-470.

Epelboim, J., Booth, J. R., Ashkenazy, R., Taleghani, A. & Steinman, R. M. (1997). Fillers and spaces in text: the importance of word recognition during reading. Vision Research, 37, 2899-2914.

Epelboim, J., Steinman, R. M., Kowler, E., Pizlo, Z., Erkelens, C.& Collewijn, H. (1997). Gaze-shift dynamics in two kinds of sequential looking tasks. Vision Research, 37, 2597-2607.

Epelboim, J. & Suppes, P. (2001) A model of eye movements and visual working memory during problem solving in geometry. Vision Research, 41, 1561-1574.

Logvinenko, A. D., Epelboim, J. & Steinman, R. M. (2001) The role of vergence in the perception of distance: a fair test of the Bishop Berkeley's claim. Spatial Vision, 15, 77-97.

Malinov, I. V., Epelboim, J., Herst, A. N. & Steinman, R. M. (2000) Characteristics of saccades in two kinds of sequential looking tasks, Vision Research, 40, 2083-2090.

Pizlo, Z., Rosenfeld, A. & Epelboim, J. (1995). Exponential model of the time-course of size processing. Vision Research, 35, 1089-1107.

Suppes, P., Han, B., Epelboim, J. & Lu, Z-L (1999) Invariance between subjects of brain wave representations of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 12953-12958.

Suppes, P., Han, B., Epelboim, J. & Lu, Z-L (1999) Invariance of brain-wave representations of simple visual images and their names. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 14658-14663.

Steinman, R. M., Pizlo, Z., Forofonova, T. I., Epelboim, J. (In Press) One fixates accurately in order to see clearly not because one sees clearly. Spatial Vision.




This obituary was published in :

Herst A.N., Epelboim J., Steinman R.M. (2001) Temporal coordination of the human head and eye during a natural sequential tapping task. Vision Research, 41, 3318-3319.

 

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