Geoff Woodman named 2025 Distinguished Alumnus Award Winner
Geoff Woodman, PhD
From the nomination letter:
After earning his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in psychology from the University of Iowa working with Steve Luck (then at Iowa), Geoff joined Vanderbilt as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology with Jeff Schall and Marvin Chun (when both of them were also at Vanderbilt) from 2002-2006. After his postdoctoral fellowship, Geoff was appointed as a Research Assistant Professor, then hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2007. He rose through the ranks to his current professorship and named chair. Geoff is a leading expert in the use of event-related potentials (ERP) to understand the interactions between attention and short-term and long-term memory. In collaboration with Schall, Geoff did important translational work examining intracranial electrophysiological activity gives rise to ERPs at the scalp in macaque monkeys. He has conducted ground-breaking work on the cognitive effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), including collaborative projects with Sohee Park examining the effects of tDCS in patients with schizophrenia. He was the recipient of the Troland Awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society, and a Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Award for Research. His work has been cited 17,745 times, he has an h-index of 58, and based on a vita I received from him last winter, he has 115 peer-reviewed publications. He has received numerous grants over the course of his distinguished career from NSF and NIH. He is the PI of the VVRC NIH training grant in vision science. Geoff is also an outstanding teacher and mentor. His former trainees have had great success, including several in faculty positions at places like University of Amsterdam, University of Toronto, Boston University, University of Tennessee, and Lehigh University.